Many of the photographs in this BBC slideshow about the writer Alan Sillitoe’s life as a smoker are superb.

I was recently surprised to learn a lot from the Criterion Edition(!) of Armageddon and even more surprised to find myself recognizing my own photographic traits in the approaches taken by the film’s director Michael Bay. When I saw the film at the cinema I remember thinking it was bad—and I am anything but an art house movie snob. One of the first questions on the commentary track is: “Why is there a Criterion Edition of Armageddon?” In the Criterion essay by one of Bay’s former tutor’s, Jeanine Basinger, she describes how she immediately admired his still photography:

The first time I saw Michael Bay, he was a polite eighteen-year-old who stopped by my office at Wesleyan University to tell me he wanted to major in Film Studies. He also asked me if I would like to see his still photographs. As a teacher, I believe there is only one answer to that question: “Of course.” (It’s my job.) Over the years, I’ve seen a great deal of material from freshmen—short stories, novels, plays, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, prints, fashion designs, videos, computer art, movies in 8mm and 16mm, even recipe collections—but I have yet to see anything like Bay’s high school photos. They were astonishing—revealing an amazing eye for composition, an instinct for capturing movement, and an inherent understanding of implied narrative.

Armageddon was shot on over a million feet of hi-res Kodak film and directed by a former still photographer. It looks like it. It also looks like it was shot by a former director of music videos and advertisements. That’s what Michael Bay is. This is probably one of the many reasons why so many critics hated it. I found the clumsy use of coloured filters to cast skies and landscapes particularly painful to watch, but there are many other striking and powerful visual effects (and I don’t mean that in the sense of “SFX”) in the movie. You might not want to imitate them directly, but listening to the director explain how he obtained them is, er, illuminating.

This still shows William Fichtner who plays a NASA shuttle pilot. In the accompanying part of the commentary, the film’s director Michael Bay describes part of his visual style. He

• offsets subjects in the frame,
• favours extreme brow-to-jaw close-ups,
• uses old lenses for their characteristic flare (halos and spikes around bright lights),
• shoots movement through prominent defocused foregrounds,
• views scenes from low angles
• tries to tell as much of the story as possible without words

All of these are things I like to do, but there are other more general lessons that a still photographer can learn from the way movie images are made.

Film stages are artificially uncluttered. In contrast, when you watch home movies of real settings it’s striking how much irrelevant surrounding junk moves your eyes away from the action, even in videos of locations well known to you. Our visual systems filter irrelevant details from real-world environments, but we find it much harder to see the wood for the trees in two-dimensional projections of reality. Craftspeople and technicians deliberately simplify movie furniture, movie food, movie textiles, even movie street signage. Unless you have complete control over your photographic environment—a studio, assistant(s), stylist(s)—you can’t do all of this, but you can tidy away the “junk” in your own images in other ways, by framing closely on your main subject, by opening up the aperture to defocus less other elements, by choosing carefully the space in which you capture your images.

Film-makers work to a plan. In their minds they will have a vision; on paper they will draw a storyboard—a “comic-strip” of the shots that they hope will make up the final movie. Some people think that one of the most important differences between good professional photographers and good amateurs is that the pros have a picture in mind before they take one and get it because they know how to; the amateurs get a shot more by accident. The better you plan, the fewer images you will delete or dud frames you will find on a roll.

Film-makers must exercise patience. Small-scale still photography jobs rarely last longer than a day or two, but big-budget movies are long projects that require the co-operation of many skilled craftspeople. If you cultivate just a fraction of their patience you are more likely to get the kind of results you are aiming for.

Film directors usually insist on multiple takes of every scene and only print the best. You should do the same. Your camera has continuous shooting and exposure bracketing capabilities for a reason.

If you are taking formal wedding shots then the movie model becomes even more relevant. You do literally direct people into place or, even better, let them move naturally and choose the shots you take and print in order to “edit down” the “cut” of the proceedings that you finally show. Often you do this to emphasise the connections between the participants. Most weddings are, by still portrait photography standards, big productions and involve families and friends. If you want to tell their stories and convey their emotional relationships then it helps to be able to see how they relate to each other physically.

Steve Shill, one of the directors of HBO’s historical TV drama Rome, used to be a painter and an actor. Despite their very different professional backgrounds (and the different media they work in), Shill shares some visual tastes with Bay. In his commentary to Episode 8 of Rome he also talks about how he also likes to shoot his main players close-up with wide lenses, and, like Bay, Shill is careful to choose the aperture and framing in such shots to capture the relationships between the characters. Even when their mouths are closed and their features blurred he wants the arrangement of the other faces in each frame to say something about the narrative and their place in it.

Think about this when you take your own must-have shots: make sure you can identify and include your main players, guide your cast into the best places (“block” them, if you like), and always keep in mind your own overall vision of the event you are recording.

It’s perhaps a little cute of me finally to compare the approach of modern wedding photographers who aim to take more relaxed photographs with that used in the “making of” footage that often comes bundled with DVDs, but it’s true that some of the most pleasing group shots are the ones you snatch during the assembly and disassembly of formal groups. Family photographers should be interested in humans, not roles, and pictures of people at play can say so much more than pictures of people in place.

The rangefinders used by the real masters of street photography, of which the most famous are those made by Leica aren’t just small and light; they’re amazingly quiet. But you really need to know your stuff to handle one of them with confidence. (There are also photographers who are skeptical about the claimed advantages of going old-time.)

The guys on this site, however, do know their stuff and do believe the hype. They make their case with some lovely galleries of magical images they capture with their anachronistic tools. This, for example, is a beauty, but some of my other favourites [note that links might be slow to respond] are here, here, here, here [Not Safe For Work], here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.