Video game fans love to post their screenshots on social media, images captured from their favorite titles. For this reason many video games have incorporated Photo Mode, sometimes a very accurate option that allows you to take shots, more or less artistic, during game actions.
Capturing the right moment e achieve the perfect shot however, it is not easy. To understand what we need to look for and what we need to look at before capturing an image, we asked 3 so-called virtual photographers.
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The advice of Cristiano Bonora
Virtual photographer Cristiano Bonora has always liked to capture memory screenshots, souvenirs of virtual worlds that he visited, but the first Photo Modes were very experimental and uncomfortable in the controls, so, even though he loved photography, he did not immediately dedicate himself to it seriously. It was to convince him Uncharted 4. Then in 2018 he won the Sony photo contest held for God of War, and since then he has begun to exhibit and develop an increasingly professional method.
For Bonora photography is not a creation from nothing, is a dialogue between photographer and subjects. For this reason, on the one hand he tries to capture the sense of a story, the psychology of a character, the climax of the action, the essence of a world; on the other, he tells who he is and how he experiences the video game.
Already in 2006, the shots at characters of Second Life that the artists Eva and Franco Mattes exhibited as self-portraits. Bonora tells us: “Photography, in some way, always speaks of the photographer. His sensitivity, his intelligence, but sometimes also his banality or ignorance, shines through in it. Like Snow White’s mirror, she can be very strict ”. For this reason he also recommends some caution before publishing his shots: “Don’t rush to get compliments. Photography is strange, because you only realize you have taken bad photos when you learn how to make better ones ”.
To get a good screenshot, according to Bonora, you shouldn’t lock yourself up in the video game. Hundreds of hours in Photo Modes and thousands of shots do not guarantee outstanding results. Before getting lost in the virtual, better to become familiar with photography in general. Leaf through a composition manual, choose a favorite photographer, try to understand what makes his shots special. Photography is a language and like all languages it has its rules that we can decide to break with criteria, but first you need to know them anyway.
While playing, don’t photograph everything. Better to look for something meaningful and always ask yourself what you want to represent: you are a Spider-Man photographer, the answer to this question cannot be trivially Spider-Man, but Spider-Man on top of a skyscraper that watches over his New York in the light of dawn. A photograph becomes interesting when it is even a small text.
Moving on to practice, the most common early mistakes are staying too far away or getting physically close instead of zooming, distorting the subjects accordingly. It should be remembered that photographing means “writing with light”, so don’t shoot in low light or uninteresting conditions. Finally, don’t have too many illusions about post-production: editing can optimize the image, but it doesn’t turn a bad photo into a good one. It is better to shoot less and more carefully than to save thousands of images by relying on the statistics and some magic of Photoshop.
You can admire it Cristiano Bonora’s work on his Vertical Gaming Photography portfolio site, which contains all the galleries he has created; he is also very active on Instagram at @verticalgamingphotography.
The advice of Emanuele Bresciani
Emanuele Bresciani approached virtual photography in 2004, when that visionary genius of Kazunori Yamahuchi inserted into the video game Gran Turismo 4 an image capture software that would become the progenitor of all Photo Modes to come.
The photos he took of that game liked his friends a lot and made him realize he had a good instinct for composition. In 2010, on a famous video game forum he met Duncan Harris, who had just made his debut the deadendthrills.com website codifying the main rules of a new expressive form called: free room, no Hud, no cutscene. In the same year, Bresciani, second in the world after Harris, proposed a virtual photography site he called Electricblueskies and which he managed until 2016.
Even today Bresciani spreads videogame culture through exhibitions and displays of his photography works also thanks to the Neoludica collective, managed by museum curators Debora Ferrari and Luca Traini. This year a photo of him by Assassin’s Creed II was chosen from the prestigious Alinari Foundation for Photography to tour Europe and Asia with another 74 real photographs of Italian landscapes, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In his shots, Bresciani initially looked for gameplay images that had the quality of the official ones, telling in a single shot the essence of the video game in a vibrant and unique way. Working on Assassin’s Creed: Origins changed his approach: “From that project I took a completely different path to rewrite the game and its settings to my liking, using both Virtual Photography and Photo Mode as tools for disassemble and reassemble the title according to a conceptual project that changes from time to time, suggested by the emotions that the game can give me over the first 30-40 hours “.
An example of this change is the project focused on Ghost of Tsushima, born when Bresciani realized how detailed the faces and clothes of the non-playable secondary characters, the Npc, were. Bresciani transformed a normal Virtual Photography session into a photojournalist’s story with the power of time travel: “I created a contamination between real historical photography and Virtual Photography, portraying virtual people in a virtual environment as if they were real inhabitants of the Japanese Middle Ages immersed in everyday actions”.
To get a good screenshot, Bresciani recommends move away from the game camera, approaching people and details that have a meaning and a tone, trying to tell a story without assuming that what you want to convey to the public is easily understood. Finding a compromise between clarity, legibility and expressive intensity should be the first goal. Another tip is to always questioning oneself, do not assume that you are good, better re-evaluate the work done at least once a year. If looking at a series of photos taken a year earlier you think that 4 out of 5 are ugly or revisable, it means that the aesthetic sense is improving and nourishes the essential qualities to emerge.
Emanuele Bresciani’s beautiful work can be found on brescianiemanuele.com where, in addition to sharing photos, he manages a blog with his experiences; on Instagram he is @emalord, on Twitter he is @electricbskies and on Facebook with the name Bresciani Emanuele – Virtual Photography. Live has a nice project underway for the Rome Video Game Lab to be held in Cinecittà from 4 to 7 November this year, where he will exhibit giant posters of the video game Ghost of Tsushima which he reimagined as the path of a photojournalist who portrays NPCs with the style of historical photography.
The advice of Pierfrancesco Olianas
Pierfrancesco Olianas, known as @myvirtualtrips, has been approaching virtual photography ever since video games have made it possible to capture screenshots directly from the console. Since then he has always done so during his gaming sessions. As for virtual photography, he began his journey about 3 years ago thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2, which still continues to be the video game on which it focuses most of its business.
Olianas tries to compose and take photos that are capable of telling, and in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 “This is possible thanks to the behavior of each of the characters and the way they interact with each other “.
To get a good screenshot, Olianas first of all recommends observe the environment surrounding to identify something that deserves to be immortalized. Never cut important objects or parts of the subject you want to photograph. Also, it should be remembered that a screenshot taken during a cutscene, an animation scene contained within a video game, is not considered a photograph because it captures an image that was not composed by you. The use of Photo Mode, or in any case of a free camera, is essential: you must always use it, if available.
The shots of Pierfrancesco Olianas can be admired on her Instagram profile at @myvirtualtrips.
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