In December 2024 we retired the Stockimo app, but we’re still accepting Smartphone photos. You can read the latest update here. If you’re looking to upload your mobile phone photos to ºÚ¹Ï³ÔÁÏyou can sign up here.
This blog article from 2015 has been kept live for archival purposes.
I wanted to write about some of my favourite movies where I was mesmerized by the cinematography, which in some cases would influence shoot briefs that I did in the past as an art director for photo shoots. Watching films was sometimes a form of pleasurable homework! I remember a fellow art director fashioning a business shoot from the influential Tarantino’s movie, , known for the sartorial flair of the main protagonists, ensemble casting and pop culture references.
Starting with movies these were exclusively shot in black and white and characterised by the use of strong shadow and light, with many scenes shot at night. Silhouettes and shadows loomed into the scene, pre-empting something sinister and menacing was about to happen. Classics of this kind are the , , (described as Gothic Noir), and directed by Fritz Lang. The Coen Brothers paid homage to the noir aesthetic with their classic noir  while introducing the genre of neo-noir with their film . The films of Lars Von Trier reveal a highly distinctive blend of film noir and German Expressionism. These days Nordic noir is influencing the way TV crime series are shot and have contributed to shaping the style of images that now adorn the covers of thriller, crime and suspense fiction books.
A director that has been influential to photography is David Lynch, known for his surrealist works and developing a unique cinematic style. When I saw the film it made me rethink visually the concept of Americana. The shot of the white picket fence and other themes are representative of Americana and the American Dream which Lynch contrasts magnificently with the darkness of secrets and the underbelly of small town suburbia.
, another top choice, is by Director Terrence Malick described as an ‘American visionary and cinematic poet’. This movie, rife with visual poetry encompasses the concept of ‘cinematic’ beautifully. It utilises the haunting landscape of the Texas panhandle as not only a backdrop but also a protagonist to the drama being enacted between the principal characters.
The deliberate use of colour as a cinematic device is interesting to observe. Peter Greenaway uniquely constructed his main characters Helen Mirren and co. in to walk from each richly coloured set in red green and white, their clothes adapting to the colour of each room as they entered. In the Three Colours trilogy , and by Krzysztof Kieślowski, each narrative was constructed symbolically around these colours. And who can forget the poignant device used by Spielberg in : the shot of an unidentified girl highlighted in a blood red coloured cloak, the only colour against the monochromatic bleakness of war and setting of a concentration camp. Often this device has been adopted in photography, not always successfully though, but when it is it can work really well. It’s also worth pointing out here that companies adopt particular colours for their brand and will be looking for images with particular tones and shades of colour that can reflect their brand.
The famous photographer William Eggleston (often referred to as having more or less invented fine-art colour photography) includes Hitchcock’s famous movie in ‘because I first discovered how well colour can be used’.
The movie is resplendent with creative devices to suggest the way the main characters are seen to be sliding from realism into a fantasy world. This is where animation pops up, atmospheric colour casts and heavy use of allusion. Stanley Kubrick in uses the brilliant device of staging horror in a brightly lit vast interior, not a dark spooky house, yet the effect is even more claustrophobic. It was in this film too that the use of the Steadicam set a new standard in film making and its POV effects are utilised in photography today.
provoked a different visual look in utilising a kind of ‘shoot at the hip’ jumpy style and characterised by a rougher less ‘lit’ sensibility. dazzled us with Ridley Scott’s cinematic vision of a futuristic world. And who can resist the films of Woody Allen: the homage to slapstick in ; the glorious cinematography in and in his ‘love letter’ to New York in the movie .
Currently (and for some time) my muse has been Wes Anderson and his imaginative and quirky works. His most recent work reveals some of including nostalgia and a ‘deep-rooted fondness for out-of-date eras and cultures’, his love of patterns and bursts of colour, his use of symmetry in his films.
There are of course too many movies to mention here but let us know your film choices that have inspired your work!
On Alamy, we have number of photographers where the images are imbued with a cinematic aesthetic – lifestyle photographers and for example and for atmospheric urban scenes and night photography there’s the work of . There are also dazzling examples to be found in the mobile photography .
Photographers can also revel in the number of available these days that can transform your images into cinematic moments if you so desire.
LA FIN.