Celeste Sloman has a lot of great work. What I love most about Sloman’s work is how clean the shots are. As in clean I mean that the lighting is always perfect and the edits are not overbearing and works perfectly with the photo. The lightning in each picture always goes perfectly with the subjects expression.
From the Women of the 116th Congress album, this picture stood out to me the most. The first thing that I noticed about the photograph was the facial expression. I feel that the smile was genuine and was a can
did shot. Her smile looks natural and it’s as if you can picture her laughing at that moment. Another observation that I subject isn’t looking in the camera, which makes the picture look even more candid.
The lighting that was used in this image was short light with a fill. I could tell it’s short light because the subject isn’t face directly at the camera and her one side of the face isn’t fully lit. Short light helped make the black and white look amazing. The side that isn’t lit helped bring more contrast in the black and white, making it feel more detailed.
So much of professional photography is dedicated to making beautiful young women look beautiful and that is not Sloman’s agenda here at all. She wants to make these women look powerful. What is so interesting about the photo that you selected is that the subject really does not look attractive. She does look like she is enjoying herself and is finding something funny. It is a great moment.
This could be considered a 3/4 view but it is just barely one. Here the light is falling on the side of the visible ear so really it would be broad light but I am not sure I would get into that. She isn’t sufficiently in 3/4 view to talk about either broad or short light.