10.14. | Photography Secret-Agent Training: Where Darkness Is Your Friend

The Brilliant Fusion: Brassaï & Bresson — Two Masters, One Challenge

That evening we set ourselves a particularly unusual creative task: combine the moody, nocturnal black-and-white atmosphere of Brassaï with the principles of Henri Cartier-Bresson, master of the dynamic, captured instant. We wanted our pictures to be colourful and alive, yet still mysterious.

The key phrase was: blurred movement beside sharp, fixed elements. In plain English: the model stands still as a post while someone in the background rushes off to do something apparently vital and becomes nothing more than a streak of colour.

We started playing with space as if it were a theatre set. We could choose different hierarchies:

The Hero (Model) Is Sharp: The crowd can dissolve into motion while the model's face says: I know the secret.

The Background Takes the Lead: What if the neon light in a shop window is the real subject and the model is only a restrained human accent in front of it?

The Foreground Becomes the Fortress: Blurred raindrops or the soft edge of a column can frame the scene while everything else becomes a depth-of-field mystery.

Hunting Light: Hold Your Breath and Lock Focus

It was night and we wanted movement to blur, so we gave the camera a relatively luxurious 1/15 second to collect light. In photography terms, that's an eternity—more than enough time to shake the camera.

This is where photography turned into martial arts:

Breath Control: “Big breath in—and hold it when you press the shutter!” We were practically suffocating in pursuit of the perfect frame.

Focus Trick: Make the camera lock focus on the model's face, keep the shutter button half-pressed, then recompose so the model sits exactly where you want in the frame.

The Crouching Photographer Commando

The hardest instruction concerned perspective: “Crouch!”

We had to abandon the familiar, boring eye-level view and photograph from lower down, around the centre of the human figure. Imagine the tourists: a group of people standing around outside, holding their breath and crouching with cameras set to slow shutter speeds. Not exactly normal.

Then came the black belt of composition: make vertical images only, while keeping roughly equal space above and below the model. This helps prevent architecture from appearing to collapse and keeps the subject from getting lost in too much “sky” or “ground”. And of course we placed the model to one side, leaving the other side available for a background story told by ghostlike passers-by.

Practical Magic: Trapped by the Shop Windows

Our field exercise took place around the shop windows near St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

Mission #1: Dynamic Night Portrait. Models stood in shop-window light—half the face bright, half in shadow; instant character—while photographers crouched and tried to catch their 1/15-second ghosts. Tiny camera shake, major struggle.

Mission #2: The Masters' Still Life at Home. The online group didn't escape either. Their task was to stack two mugs on a plate, set a slow shutter speed, stabilise the camera (a pile of books counts), then drop a napkin in front of the mugs and capture its movement. Kitchen action cinema.

The wildest part came next: upload the result to an AI tool such as Gemini or Photoroom and ask it to transform the image into a luxury advertising photograph. Who knows—perhaps even a blurred napkin can become Japanese ceramics.

At the end, everyone received one final, merciless assignment for the week: consciously apply the Above-Below Balance rule and the two-thirds/one-third placement to every photograph. Before pressing the shutter, scan the entire edge of the display so that the composition is already right when the picture is made.

The night-photography commando finally withdrew from the darkness with tired bodies, knees trembling from crouching and memory cards full of experiments. We may not have found our personal style yet, but at least we now know that sometimes a good picture genuinely requires holding your breath.

Part of the BANHALMI ecosystem

For the professional context and practical side of portrait photography, visit the BANHALMI professional website. Related art series, books and exhibitions are preserved in the BANHALMI ART archive.