An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a waxed-paper negative that produced sharper-focus prints.

Because he enjoyed the artistic challenges of landscape more than the routine of studio portraiture, Le Gray produced some of his most popular and memorable works in 1856, 1857, and 1858; now with glass negatives and albumen silver prints), and a series of dramatic and poetic seascapes that brought international acclaim.

The dramatic effects of sunlight, clouds, and water in Le Gray’s seascapes stunned his contemporaries and immediately brought him international recognition.

This is something that I am really intrigued by when I researched his work. His landscape photographs are really fantastic because of the way the light seeped through the clouds to illuminate the landscape. I particularly love his seascape photographs so that was what I chose to focus on.

At a time when photographic emulsions were not equally sensitive to all colors of the spectrum, most photographers found it impossible to achieve proper exposure of both landscape and sky in a single picture. Le Gray solved this problem by printing two negatives on a single sheet of paper: one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky, and sometimes made on separate occasions or in different locations. Le Gray’s marine pictures caused a sensation not only because their simultaneous depiction of sea and heavens represented a technical tour de force, but also because the resulting poetic effect was without precedent in photography.

With the style of Gustave Le Gray for my mid-term assignment in my mind, I headed down to Changi beach to capture some seascapes.

I experimented with 2 different exposures using my DSLR to get the sea exposure and the sky exposure perfectly.

So in photoshop, I literally took the sky from the underexposed photograph to merge with the sky in the properly exposed one.

And this was the final result after editing:

And I incorporated the same method for 2 other photographs I took that day:

I really liked the effects of it as it gave such a dramatic effect to my landscapes photographs!