When a still life photography session turns into a lesson in light and a prompt for deeper reflection. Julien Apruzzese (jas.studio) is a commercial photographer whose work spans a wide range of subjects, from fashion and flowers to portraiture. But what drives his practice is the notion of the image in its broadest sense. “What interests me isn’t the subject as such, it’s the lines, the shapes, the colours.” This session, held at the Paris Salon de la Photo 2024 in a restricted-access format, ran for two hours and produced a single still life photograph of a yellow flower, shot on a Fujifilm GFX. It gave Apruzzese the opportunity to walk through his working method in detail, and gave us plenty to think about.
Still life photography: lighting as an art form
Author’s note: this account faithfully reports what Apruzzese said without editorial comment. Personal reflections appear in the conclusion.
Still life photography: beauty is not a matter of taste
Before switching on a single flash, Julien Apruzzese sets out a theoretical framework. For him, the beauty of an image is not a personal preference but a shared perception, one that can be accounted for by both art and science. He draws on an analogy from music:
“The eye is a perfect comparator and a poor analyser.”
Just as the ear cannot produce an isolated note yet has no difficulty perceiving intervals, the eye works through difference. An image that piles up colours with no hierarchy produces, in his view, visual cacophony.
Converting street photography to black and white resolves this problem by eliminating chromatic dissonance.
His conclusion is that a technically accomplished image remains recognisable as such, regardless of the viewer’s sensibility. He illustrates the point with an image by Stark. “If the left-hand image works, the right-hand one works too.” What holds for the original holds for any reworking of it.
I don’t want to be pigeon-holed. I want to remain free to create beauty. For me, beauty isn’t subjective. The beauty of an image can be explained by art and by science. It’s about how I see things.
I’ll leave readers to explore Julien’s work on his website. His colour choices are refined and elegant, his images carefully selected and composed. Impressive work, whatever one may think of commercial photography as a genre.
Hue, saturation, brightness: the three variables of still life photography
Hues, Apruzzese reminds us, are simply the colours of the spectrum in sequence. Pink is red with low saturation and high brightness; brown is no different. When he builds a mass within the frame, he chooses colour, saturation and brightness simultaneously. The work then rests entirely on contrasts, meaning differences in brightness, which generate the harmonies.
The same principle governs retouching. He cites the retoucher working with Norwegian photographer Erwin Olaf as a case in point. His PSD files are nothing but successive brush strokes on curves. Staying focused on those same three axes, colour, saturation and brightness, “he works in Photoshop CS6. All he needs is a brush and a curve.”
For Apruzzese, a professional retoucher’s quality rests entirely on the eye. Retouching must be done zone by zone, never globally.
Technical setup
The entire session is shot on a tripod, a deliberate choice:
I work like a painter setting up his easel. It lets me isolate each element one by one and change only one variable at a time.
The lens of choice is the 120 mm GFX, equivalent to a 95 mm in full-frame terms. The tethering software is Capture One, described as the standard in 80% of professional studios, used here with Profoto profiles.
The initial settings are deliberately conservative. ISO 80 to produce a completely black frame with no ambient light, shutter speed at 1/125s (the flash sync limit), aperture at f/16 (the midpoint of a lens capable of reaching f/32). The test shot must be completely black, confirming that the flash alone is providing light.
[Ed. This is a standard point in studio photography, whether still life or otherwise, and it regularly surprises clients. In my own studio, even though we have overhead skylights, the strobe is 100% responsible for the light. Without it, the shot is completely black, and that’s entirely intentional.]
Still life photography: building the light in three steps
Julien Apruzzese structures his lighting setup around three parameters, in this order. Apparent size of the light source, direction, orientation.
Still life photography: building the light in three steps
Julien Apruzzese structures his lighting setup around three parameters, in this order: apparent size of the light source, direction, and orientation.
- Apparent size is the first factor. A small source produces hard light; a large source produces soft light. Perceived size results from the ratio between the physical size of the source and its distance from the subject. To simulate atmospheric light, he points a first flash at the ceiling: “You take a 10 cm source and bounce it off the ceiling. The apparent size becomes 5 metres.” To ensure chromatic neutrality, a white umbrella with a diffuser replaces direct ceiling bounce. “A silver umbrella is useless. You need a diffuser,” he adds.
- The direction and orientation of this ambient light are adjusted so that the gradient between the flower and the background is as even as possible, which means placing the flash far enough back. No light meter involved: “There are no rules or measurements. It’s done by eye.”
- Exposure follows an analogue-to-digital recording principle: push the light as far as possible without blowing the highlights, then reduce brightness in post-processing. Apruzzese uses Capture One’s two histograms, before and after processing, to keep this in check. An LCC (Lens Cast Correction) profile is created using a grey card to correct any colour and brightness drift specific to the shooting conditions.
A second flash, and it’s just the beginning
A second flash, fitted with a Fresnel lens, is then aimed at the flower to create the main directional light. The lens collimates the rays in the manner of sunlight. Apruzzese identifies three ways of achieving this. Distance at the cost of power loss, a Fresnel lens, and a parabolic reflector. A snoot narrows the beam without collimating it. Together, the two flashes replicate the pairing of atmospheric light and direct sunlight.
A third flash with a snoot is added to light the stem specifically, complemented by a black reflector to mask part of the beam.
What the choice of yellow flower reveals in still life photography
The session closes with an observation about the initial choice of subject. “You can see that this choice ultimately doesn’t matter, because all you have to do is vary the light to change the shade of yellow.” The perceived colour depends on the lighting. What determines the composition is not the subject’s original hue, but the brightness relationships that the light creates between the masses.
What I take away from this session
From this still life session, what stays with me above all is the importance of light, as it was in the previous year’s demonstration. I particularly like the parallel with painting, the time spent on a single photograph, and the meticulousness brought to every detail.
The conclusion struck me as faintly ironic, though it’s a very important one. With software, almost anything is possible. Yet the photographer’s goal remains to take the best possible shot with as little retouching as needed. This isn’t about denying the usefulness of post-processing, it has its place, but about affirming the maxim of our friend Philippe Bernet of Objectif Image:
Good retouching will never rescue a bad photograph.
That irony in the conclusion, two hours to photograph a flower only to conclude that everything can be changed, doesn’t really alter anything. It’s a stance. Julien Apruzzese’s work on his website is there to prove it. Its quiet strangeness owes less to Capture One than to the author’s artistic sensibility, and his images are well worth taking the time to appreciate.
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Je suis photographe et aquarelliste. Je pratique la photographie depuis l'enfance et la photographie numérique depuis 1995. J'en ai fait mon activité principale en 2021. Je possède un studio photo dans le 15e arrondissement de Paris
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