Film noir has to do how you light the scene. In my head, that is dramatic angled light, hard light sources, deep shadows, some kind of city environment or indoor dark environment. Mainly rim/accentuating light as main light on any persons, use of silhouettes, stylish women/dangerous women and some kind of six-shooter and also a fedora at one pointl
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You need to use hard light-sources and use the shadows
But since you ask about the style and not the media....
IMO it's just as much about shadow that it is about the light parts. Also, in the old days, they used a lot of hard light-sources, which meant harder shadows and more dramatic light.
Most film-noir films in the 40's to the 50's were indeed shot at night, they often used hot-lights and they lit the whole scene they shot.
- In the 60-70's they started using filters to re-create a night setting during the day, which suck donkey tail imo, look at any cheesy cowboy spaghetti thing from the 70's, awful
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That's how I interpret the "look" of Film-noir anyway, IMO it has to end up looking "old" (or at least not modern), so use film that has an older look and has less sensitivity to red (like Foma 100).
If I was to shoot such scenes using film, I would use Foma 100 and light the _whole_ scene, it would simply not be possible to do this in the examples below.
These three are my attempts in the past to recreate a film noir look, all are shot at night and all were shot using artificial light-sources along with the street-lights in the area. Since I was one photographer with 2 flashes, I needed to use the existing light in the area.
This meant that I needed to use high-ISO (ISO 1600-3200) to get the natural (artificial) light-sources in the area strong enough, while still being able to shoot a living person. Since I wanted clean shots, it meant that all of these are shot using d*gital. (medium is not important, I just happen to want clean high-iso and dark shadows etc etc, since I don't have a whole staff to light up a neighborhood
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First shot is the latest, personal project, the two latter shots, are student projects shot a few years back, where I initially tried out my own technique, to get a feel for this kind of shooting.
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Femme-fatale
There's the femme-fatale -and the guy in the fedora lol
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Femme-fatale with gun, off-course
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At least that's how I interpreted the subject, mimicking the old style film noir.
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