Category · Photography
Photography
Photography is the category most creators reach for first — partly because it's the one most models handle confidently, partly because "make it look like a photo" is the most common request a creator ever phrases. We've split the category by who made the work, not by gear: a Saul Leiter is not a 35mm Film entry, even though both are 35mm film. Movements, photographers, and chemical processes get their own pages. Filters and apps don't. The styles below are the ones we could write 200 honest words about without flinching.
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Styles in this category
24 styles
35mm Film Photography
35mm film photography is the look of the dominant consumer and editorial photographic format of the second half of the twentieth century.…
Open style
Annie Leibovitz Portrait
Annie Leibovitz's portrait work for Rolling Stone (1970–1983) and Vanity Fair (1983–present) defined what a contemporary celebrity portra…
Open style
ArchViz / Architectural Visualization
ArchViz (architectural visualization) is the industry-standard 3D rendering style used by architecture firms, real-estate developers, and…
Open style
Bleach Bypass
Bleach bypass (also called skip-bleach or ENR after Technicolor's named process variant) is a film-chemistry technique where the bleachin…
Open style
Cross-Processed
Cross-processing is the deliberate misuse of film chemistry: developing color slide film (E-6 process) in negative-film chemistry (C-41)…
Open style
Cyanotype Photogram
A cyanotype is a 19th-century photographic printing process — paper coated with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, expos…
Open style
Cyanotype
The cyanotype process was invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and used almost immediately by the botanist Anna Atkins to produce Photog…
Open style
Daido Moriyama High-Contrast B&W
Daido Moriyama's photographs of postwar Tokyo are the most influential street photography to come out of Japan. The visual signature is e…
Open style
Film Noir
Film noir is not just "black and white." It is a specific photographic grammar built in 1940s Hollywood out of three constraints — German…
Open style
Golden Hour Naturalism
Golden hour is the roughly 60 minutes after sunrise and before sunset when the sun is low enough that its light passes through more atmos…
Open style
Gregory Crewdson Cinematic Still
Gregory Crewdson makes photographs that look like single frames from films that don't exist. Each image is shot on a soundstage or locati…
Open style
Helmut Newton Fashion
Helmut Newton shot fashion photography between roughly 1961 and his death in 2004 with a vocabulary borrowed from film noir, Surrealism,…
Open style
Kubrick Symmetric Wide
Stanley Kubrick's visual signature is the most analyzed in cinema history and the most replicable in still imagery. The shorthand is "one…
Open style
Magnum Documentary
Magnum Photos was founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, and George Rodger as a photographer-owned…
Open style
National Geographic Editorial
National Geographic's photographic identity formed roughly between Steve McCurry's 1985 Afghan Girl cover and Sebastião Salgado's Genesis…
Open style
Polaroid / Instant Film
Polaroid and instant film share three properties no digital filter has fully reproduced: a chemical color cast that drifts toward magenta…
Open style
Roger Deakins Naturalism
Roger Deakins is the most decorated living cinematographer (16 Oscar nominations, 2 wins for Blade Runner 2049 and 1917) and the most imi…
Open style
Saul Leiter Street Color
Saul Leiter shot color street photography in New York from the late 1940s through the 1970s while almost nobody else was — Walker Evans a…
Open style
Sofia Coppola Soft Pastel
Sofia Coppola's visual signature across her eight feature films — The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinett…
Open style
Spike Lee Double Dolly
Spike Lee's visual signature includes the most distinctive single shot in modern American cinema: the "double dolly," in which the camera…
Open style
Tintype / Wet Plate
The wet-plate collodion process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and was the dominant photographic process from roughly 185…
Open style
Villeneuve Monolithic Sci-Fi
Denis Villeneuve's science fiction films — Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Dune (2021), Dune: Part Two (2024) — have establishe…
Open style
Vivian Maier Mid-Century Street
Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago and New York from the 1950s through the 1990s and shot roughly 150,000 photographs that nobody…
Open style
Wes Anderson Symmetric
Wes Anderson's visual language is the most imitated in contemporary cinema for a reason: it is rule-based and easy to identify. The rules…
Open style