GTA 5 : Colour
63 images Created 23 May 2020
All photographers know that the act of taking a photograph is as simple as pressing a button, be it on a digital camera, film camera, phone, tablet or in this case, a ‘virtual camera’. The end result is always the same: a photograph. Enter the virtual world of online gaming.
GTA 5 is a PlayStation game that cost $265 Million to develop and market, making it the most expensive video game ever produced. GTA 5 soared beyond the $1 billion mark in the first 3 days after it’s launch, eventually making over $6 billion & selling over 145 million copies worldwide. The game's open world setting is modeled on Los Angeles (called Los Santos) and real-life neighbourhoods like downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown, South Central, Venice Beach and Beverly Hills. Other iconic sites are the Hollywood Bowl, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, the legendary Whisky A Go Go club and the Playboy Mansion etc. Weather and lighting are fundamental aspects throughout the game as they play a crucial role in portraying reality. The light is also very realistic, especial in the morning and evening. It is so good that I have taken hundreds of screen grabs and processed them via Photoshop. I have converted them into B&W images, added some film grain, vignettes and a few other effects to make them look like old analog film photos.
The results were similar to the ‘film noir’ effect. Moody, dark and dramatic: the term ‘film noir’ may instantly conjure cinematic scenarios in your mind of hard-boiled detectives and brassy women that drag trouble behind them like tattered coats. Hollywood thriller or crime movies that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s such as The Big Sleep (Humphrey Bogart), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) were typically ‘film noir’.
Photographs are first visualized in the mind’s eye and this method just proves that you don’t need an expensive camera or indeed a camera at all to produce an image. All the same photography rules apply i.e. subject matter, composition, lighting, shapes, patterns, drama and texture etc. This new genre of ‘in-game’ or ‘screenshot’ photography could actually be used as a tool for teaching the art of photography to younger students because one would not get bogged down with the mathematics of camera settings”....... “Viva Los Santos”.
GTA 5 is a PlayStation game that cost $265 Million to develop and market, making it the most expensive video game ever produced. GTA 5 soared beyond the $1 billion mark in the first 3 days after it’s launch, eventually making over $6 billion & selling over 145 million copies worldwide. The game's open world setting is modeled on Los Angeles (called Los Santos) and real-life neighbourhoods like downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown, South Central, Venice Beach and Beverly Hills. Other iconic sites are the Hollywood Bowl, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, the legendary Whisky A Go Go club and the Playboy Mansion etc. Weather and lighting are fundamental aspects throughout the game as they play a crucial role in portraying reality. The light is also very realistic, especial in the morning and evening. It is so good that I have taken hundreds of screen grabs and processed them via Photoshop. I have converted them into B&W images, added some film grain, vignettes and a few other effects to make them look like old analog film photos.
The results were similar to the ‘film noir’ effect. Moody, dark and dramatic: the term ‘film noir’ may instantly conjure cinematic scenarios in your mind of hard-boiled detectives and brassy women that drag trouble behind them like tattered coats. Hollywood thriller or crime movies that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s such as The Big Sleep (Humphrey Bogart), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) were typically ‘film noir’.
Photographs are first visualized in the mind’s eye and this method just proves that you don’t need an expensive camera or indeed a camera at all to produce an image. All the same photography rules apply i.e. subject matter, composition, lighting, shapes, patterns, drama and texture etc. This new genre of ‘in-game’ or ‘screenshot’ photography could actually be used as a tool for teaching the art of photography to younger students because one would not get bogged down with the mathematics of camera settings”....... “Viva Los Santos”.
