This is one of my favorite photographs, a study of a statue of Eros and Psyche (Eros is kind of like a grown-up Cupid). Since I’m posting this around Valentine’s Day, I thought it an appropriate image for discussing statuary photography. The statue is a copy of the famous Antonio Canova sculpture, one of which resides at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The one I photographed was atop a tomb at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood California. If you like angels, a good place to shoot them is in a cemetery (pun intended).

Someone said to me today, “Must be easy shooting statues–they don’t move.” While it’s true that they are immobile, this doesn’t necessarily make them easier to photograph than a hockey game. The character of statuary can change (or be made to change) dramatically with lighting, the seasons, and weather conditions. In fact, if you’ve shot the same statue once before, consider the fact that weathering and erosion can give statuary a whole new appeal, as will the presence of snow and rain.

Photographing Statuary

How do I Start?
Find a statue that interests you. While public parks, museums, and cemeteries are all good venues, I’ll restrict my writing to outdoor statuary, as indoor photography has its own set of challenges (most of which involve lighting and security personnel). By the way, did you know that back in the mid-1800s, there were no parks or museums in America? Around this time, the garden cemetery as sculpture garden came into being. Public parks, galleries, and museums came about later, due to the immense popularity of the Victorian garden cemetery as tourist destination!

Can I photograph any old statue or monument?
Well, not if it’s on private property. Sneaking a shot can be titillating, but if you’re not allowed to display or publish it, your excursion may have been a fool’s errand! If the statue is in a public area, it’s probably okay to shoot it. Also, do no harm. Don’t climb on the statue—you don’t want to break something and be arrested for vandalism. In an old abandoned cemetery, you wouldn’t think it would make a hill of beans difference. But this is not your hill, and these are not your beans.

What kind of camera should I use?
An SLR (whether it be film or digital) gives you the most flexibility, although you can use any camera. The operative phrase is that you know how to use the camera!

Should I use color or black and white?
Hey, Paul Simon was wrong! Everything do not look worse in black and white! In fact, if you’re just shooting the statue, black and white can give you some very interesting and abstract effects. Use this if you want to create a mood or make an artistic statement. Use color if you’re shooting snapshots.

How do I compose a meaningful image?
Okay, now we’re getting to the meat of the article. Allow time to compose and photograph your subject. Pick a good time of day if possible—shooting with the sun behind you provides better direct light on the statue than when it is directly overhead. Shooting at the edges of the day also provides you with nice shadow accents. So now let’s look at the art of composition.

Composing a Photograph

Whether you’re photographing statuary for documentation purposes, creating new art, using the statue as a backdrop for a family vacation photo, or simply because you think it’s cool, you probably don’t want your photo to look snap-shoddy. The famous French photographer Eugene Atget is best known for his artistic documentation of public statuary, which to me is just a series of good snapshots. So, regardless of the type of photo you’re shooting, there are two basic things to consider: lighting and composition.

Lighting
If you happen on a statue, your creativity will be somewhat constrained by the current lighting. Good photographers can make anything work, as long as they know how to operate the camera. Front lighting is best (sun behind you, the photographer); though a backlit statue can be dealt with too. The Eros and Psyche statue was front lit, with background in shadow. I exposed for (took a light meter reading off) the bright surface of the white marble statue, which grossly underexposed the background. This is the effect I wanted, as the background detail was distracting.

For a backlit statue, you have a wider variety of options:

• Expose for the bright areas of the scene and transform the statue into silhouette. Using your camera in Auto mode will normally give you this effect if most of the scene is bright.

• You can also expose for the darker statue and wash out the brighter background, which is what I did with the statue of the two angels at right.

• Another option is to illuminate your subject with fill flash, which will keep the background properly exposed and the statue properly illuminated.

Composition
When we talk about composition, we often forget that the lighting itself is a major compositional element! Both studio lighting and available light can create all kinds of moods. With outdoor statuary, we play the cards we’re dealt–you see the statue on vacation, you have 5 minutes to shoot it. So it’s lit from the side, deal with it. While the absence of light may be the absence of truth, shadows allow the viewer more latitude for their imagination.

How do I compose a meaningful image?

That’s really less subjective than you might think! Here are a few compositional pointers that apply to both snapshots as well as artistic photography:

• If you want your photo to be pretty as a postcard, stand farther back (or use a wide angle lens) and get some of the surrounding scenery in the frame. This also helps give a sense of scale to the statue.

• If you want to capture detail of the statue, get in closer. While you can always crop or enlarge a photo later, you image is generally of better quality if you shoot your original image the way you want the final print to be.

• Meter off the statue as a starting point, then for different effects, increase or decrease exposure to your liking.

• I shoot in Aperture Priority mode mostly, as I want to control my depth of field.

• Use Image Stabilization. Why bother? The statue isn’t moving. Well, no, but you are. Also consider using a tripod and slow exposure if you want a deep depth of field.

• Pick one: Line up a vertical element of the scene with the vertical frame in your viewfinder, or line up a horizontal element of the scene with the horizontal frame in your viewfinder. Either one will give your image the appearance of being “level.”

Don’t be a Fair-weather Photographer

In conclusion, if your attempt at statuary photography was less than stellar, consider coming back to it at a different time of day or under different lighting/weather conditions. The most mundane statue can be magically transformed into a work of art during a snowstorm!