Mindset Changes EVERYTHING, in Virtual Photography
I recently went back on the game Bound (2016) by polish softco Plastic and I was utterly suprised by the radical improvements of my work when compared to my previous 2016 gallery. This fact made me think about the importance of the personal mindset when approaching Virtual Photography and how much experience and practice can affect the outcomes of our endevaours.
Let me explain: from 2010 up to 2016 Virtual Photography was only for a few pioneers. We were a few dozens on Flickr, mostly, and we regarded Duncan Harris as the example to follow for what concerns style and substance. Virtual Photography was mostly horizontal at 16:9, while 1080p was the usual target resolution. A the time I still was the one and only italian virtual photographer and the world of VP was an exciting experience for us all.
At that time, Virtual Photography was mostly a safari into the gaming worlds. We just wanted to show to the occasional audience how many details and craft was poured into the code, how many details were lost in the speedruns and how beautiful were the vastly different and unique gaming worlds. There really wasn't any attempt at "art" from our side, there was no ambition, there were no second thoughts. Virtual Photography was really a 1:1 gaming experience and my personal ambition was to have my screenshots displayed on a presskit or on the back of the games packaging. You know, very basic but still ambitious stuff.
COVID-19 changed everything. People were prisoners in their own houses and tens of thousands of people became virtual photographers overnight. One of the pros is that many of those people were actual IRL photographers and as such we were beholding a very new, artsy and professional never-seen-before approach to Virtual Photography. That moment in time was very life-changing for me, on so many levels. I learned how vertical photography brings a completely new vision to the art and how I could "conceptually" work on it, to the point I was inspired to write one of my most visited blog pages "The 5 Levels Of Virtual Photography".
After having digested for a few years the oh-so-many ways of tackling a videogame Photo Mode I finally and mostly casually went back to the above mentioned Bound, and I have to say that without the experience and practice and the open-mindness I went through in the early 2020's I would never have achieved this kind of improvements. That's why I felt the need to add this entry to my blog, to inspire you to ask, learn, study, copy, understand the work of other IRL and virtual photographers, to expand your chances beyond your very personal idea of VP, because, really, the right mindset can take your personal work to unexpected and surprising levels.
This is my 2016 Gallery, as you can see it retains almost entirely the original colors and vibes from the game with a few attempts at artsy minimalism:
Here, on the other hand, my most recent (2024) take on the same game: we have both horizontal and vertical photography, custom lighting and filters, some bold outlines and posterisation work, a tilt-shift effect, and a very creative mindset overall, using only the Photo Mode options with no offline retouch whatsaoever:
