Fine Art Male Photography

You may have heard of fine art photography, but do you know what it is? Defining ‘art’ is one of those great imponderables, but fine art photography normally combines technical exactitude with some sort of artistic merit.

In fine art photography, nudes, both male and female, are a common subject. Fine art photographs of men are often given a black and white treatment and feature strong, graphic shapes. If you are interested in shooting male nudes in a fine art style, you’re well advised to browse through galleries, coffee table books and websites to get a feel for what works.

Fine art photography is normally carried out with the equipment that yields very highest quality results, and that usually means a medium- or large-format camera. These cameras are usually designed as film cameras, but today the technology exists to fit digital ‘backs’ to them so that they record digital images.

If you want to try fine art photography, there’s no reason for you to use gear like this at first, but keep in mind that quality standards in fine art photography are absolutely uncompromising, so you’ll at least need a digital single-lens reflex camera and a decent lens – try a fixed-focal length ‘prime’ (as opposed to ‘zoom’) lens, as these give you the best ‘bang for your buck’ when it comes to image quality.

You’ll also need decent image editing software and an up-to-date computer to run it on. Besides conversion to black and white, fine art photographs are often adjusted to increase their contrast and sharpness, as both these things add impact to simple subjects. Photoshop is still the market leader in image editing software, though there are definitely alternatives.

While you can certainly do male fine art photography using only natural light, doing so will severely limit your options, so you should learn at least some of the basics of off-camera lighting. Start with an accessory flash (i.e. one that slots into your camera’s hot-shoe) that you can trigger when it is off-camera, for example with a radio trigger, and also invest in a light stand so that you can position it wherever you like. Later you can add more lights when you’re ready to experiment with more complex lighting schemes.