Photography Research: Svetlana Belyaeva

Svetlana Belyaeva is a Russian  photographer who is best known for turning her photography into art. She usually works in themes of nude, fashion and beauty. Belyaeva specializes in capturing high quality motion figures with great style. Her models wear glamorous fabrics that are used as props to create a sense of movement within the image.

Her use of colour in her images connotes the theme or meaning behind her works, such as the colour of red which could suggest the theme of passion, power and love. She also uses the colour yellow in her work a lot; this colour  has a less obvious meaning, but could suggest purity and optimism. The vibrant colour that she uses suggest power and make her models seem strong and elegant.

The way she uses clothing and fabrics as props give the images a sense of freedom as if her models are flying. The way she edits her images on Photoshop adds to this and helps her models and colours stand out against the backgrounds and surroundings. Her editing technique involves blurring sections of the background to make it seem like the models are the only thing in the image as it brings them forward in terms of depth. This gives them more importance and shows that they are the subject of the image. In certain images, blur used in a tilt-shift style is used to make the models seem like they are quite a height from the ground; which again helps helps to give it a sense of freedom and depth. The images are often given a vignette effect and have been edited with software similar to Adobe Lightroom to make the colours and skin tones seem brighter an flawless. This helps the subject of the image to stand out. Along side this, the movement in the image makes it seem like she has captures a still moment in time.

Her work links with the idea of escapism in that her images look like freeze frames of beauty and peace. The idea of capturing a moment where it seems like time has stopped still is something that I would like to portray in my own work. I would also like to experiment with the use of colour and editing with blur. Additionally, I would like to experiment with movement of the model and of clothing and fabrics.

I think Belyaeva's work would be good to use as inspiration for my magazine photography as her style of work would look beautiful in a fashion magazine. I will take inspiration from the styling of the model, locations, poses, lighting, composition and the editing techniques she has used in order to create work of the same standard with similar themes.