The Power of Avatar Photos Shot With Dramatic Lighting & Angles

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Robyn Smith experiments with light and angles to create fascinating photos. For example, “Set Fire to the Rain” as a bright light in high contrast to the velvety darkness of the shadows. It’s a stunning chiaroscuro photograph but I have to page back to March to find something similar. She is an experimenter and you will find blown-out pics that are blindingly white and black and white negatives as well as color pics with and without shadows. While nearly all the pics are of her avatar alone or with someone, there is tremendous diversity in the style of lighting and framing. 

For more examples of her range, click here:

The epic-titled "Maybe.  So maybe / Maybe we were always meant to meet / Like this was somehow destiny Like you already know / Your heart will never be broken by me" is an excellent example of how you can make a good photo great by cropping it in an interesting way. Most of the frame is negative space. Meanwhile, much of her face is cropped away, though we have enough to infer her beauty. Negative space makes it easier to focus on the subject by stripping away distractions. This is a gorgeous portrait and so much more interesting than a more traditional head shot. 

"May you always have a shell in your pocket and sand in your shoes" gives us an example of something she does fairly often, edit an old picture a new way. Here she’s flipped the original horizontally and rotated it slightly. It’s full color unlike the monochrome of her earlier edit. She cropped far closer, and used a filter to give it an aged photo feeling. Compare the two pictures and you can see how a few decisions really change the emotional subtext of the pictures. 

Robyn Smith’s photostream is fascinating. I love to compare the ways she re-edits pictures into something new, often with a completely different feeling. It almost feels like a class in editing choices. 

See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter, on her blog, and on her Ko-Fi.

Comments

[robyn smith]

Wow what can i say but i am truly thankful for your kind words t truly means a lot that you have noticed my work and my different styles and editing i use i am so honoured thank you so much Robyn