Introduction

Further to my blog post on Todd Hido’s style of photography, I thought some people might find it interesting if I provided a bit more detail on how I created my images.

However, before getting into the technical detail, I will expand a bit more on what I was trying to achieve. Todd Hido, born in 1968, is an American fine art photographer who is known for moody, night time or low-light landscape style photographs. In 2001 he released a book titled House Hunting, which was the culmination of a project where he photographed houses at night. The houses generally had a light on in a room, which showed the interior bereft of the human occupants. They were probably in the house but just not in that room when Hido took the photograph. Often he would frame the image to make the house look isolated, by not including the dwellings around it. Other projects included shooting dark and moody landscapes through his car window when it was covered in water. Indeed, he would sometimes take a plate of glass with him, and spray water on it, so that he could photograph through it to replicate the image he was after. I am not a big fan of those images where he was purposely lowering the sharpness that his camera could achieve. That is just my view and he is free to shoot an image however he wants, and art will always be always be up to subjective tastes. I understand that he is not about defining a meaning for his images, but rather leaving that to the viewer, and he is very successful at what he does.

Prior to starting my photography course I had not heard of Todd Hido but he was one of the photographers that the teacher presented as a style for us to attempt. The teacher was not trying to turn us into new-Hidos, but rather, he was trying to get us to understand different approaches to photography. Initially, attempting to shoot in Hido’s style meant going out at night and walking around to try to find a house that had a light on in a room - and also trying not to look creepy by pointing the camera out somebody’s house. I made sure that I was on public areas when I shot and also that I was not photographing a person. I didn’t mind the shots but they won’t me. I have placed some of those shots below.

However, I recalled a video on Hido that the course watched, in which there was an image of a street lamp on a breakwater beside a lake or something similar. This image was from another one of Hido’s projects called Bright Black World, which is photographed outside of the US and has an environmental sub-theme. That was the style of image I decided to replicate.

My technique for replicating Hido

There was nothing unique or difficult in how I tried to replicate Hido, it was probably how a lot of photographers would have approached the task. I decided not to try to take an image with a shutter speed fast enough to hand-hold the camera. My reasoning was that would push up my ISO, especially if I wanted a higher aperture for better depth of field. So, that meant that I would need a tripod to steady the camera. I was also happy to have the Peak Design camera strap because I could easily remove it without worrying about the wind below it around, reverberating up to the camera and blurring the shot.

I think that the shots that worked the best had a light source in them, such as the navigation lights or the lighthouse. I have placed the images below for reference. In the first two images, the breakwater help formed a leading line to the light, although the bright light contrasts against the subdued background and helps emphasise it. In the third image, the light is on the top right join of the thirds, with the sea and sky acting as negative space around the breakwater. Hopefully, in all three images, the isolated light, with no people around, also helped to evoke a sense of loneliness and gloom. These are low key images that I intended to be moody, and possibly even foreboding.

The images were all shot at 50 mm, to give that natural view of the scene. They used ISO 100, with a shutter speed of 30 seconds. The first two had a deep depth of field, f/22, but I had to open the final shot by a stop to f/16 in order to get the exposure I wanted.