But they are photographs. Is he heavily manipulating them in Photoshop? He only says he uses diffused lighting. He’s doing more than that to get this look. They could easily be mistaken for paintings.
They are quite well done. I’d love to have full size framed prints for the wall. I really like the white house winter scene. The street photo is very good too.
Dunno how he, specifically, does it, but there are some very nice image-processing filters that take pictures and make them look like oil-paintings. Take a look at dreamscopeapp.com – they have a gallery of samples on their home page. For further exploration you need to sign in, but they appear to work for free.
There are painting and drawing apps for lease – not free, but not horribly expensive – and some of them have “oil painting” filters. The results can be pretty impressive.
I’ve seen his photos in real life, and they are not at all watercolor like, rather they are super sharp focused. Very realistic. They do not look like paintings in any way.
Have you only seen images of the photos on the site you linked? Here’s a better image of the first photo shown there-
The prints in this series are also about 4 by 5 feet. Maybe you could hang it on your dining room wall. But, a lot of his earlier works are almost billboard sized!
Yeah, he’s probably my favorite artist working these days in any medium.
All photographs do go through Photoshop or similar post-processing these days, for adjusting the lighting via High Dynamic Range, or sharpening, and many are blends of multiple photos taken at different times or exposures to have them all in focus or to be the work of art they’re after.
I think what you’re perceiving is a low contrast, overcast light with a very long lens makes everything unusually, but carefully, composed and composited.
…Crewdson lights his images like a movie set. He uses big huge soft light to light his images, and is meticulous in planning his images, which includes the balance of colours that he choose to use in his final shot.
Crewdson shoot his work to be seen big. This gallery picture shows how big his prints are.
There is an extraordinary amount of detail in these shots. This is one of my favourite Crewdson images:
If you look real closely, through the mist in the background you can see a group of people there. Its hard to see online, but you can see them clear as day when looking at the print. I’m sure he is as meticulous with his post processing as he is with planning and producing the shoot. But it isn’t just the post processing that makes these shots so unique: its the attention to detail, its the pre-planning, its the deep-depth of field.
My favourite quote from the interview was “we had to cancel the rain shoot because it rained.” These are carefully crafted images, not spontaneously captured. He typically has limited print runs of 10 prints only, and they sell for up to $150,00 per print. But that isn’t surprising when each shot might cost over a hundred thousand dollars to produce. So I don’t think he is planning on making his prints more widely available.