Study the Craft #1: Adrian Sommeling and the Art of the Composite
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means to get better at photography. Not just buying another lens, watching another random Lightroom or Photoshop tutorial, or simply taking more pictures. I mean actually studying the craft.
One of the people who helped put that thought in my head wasn't a photographer at all. It was Kobe Bryant. What always stood out to me about Kobe was that his obsession with getting better wasn't limited to working harder. He studied. In The Beautiful Scar, he wrote about looking at almost everything through the lens of becoming a better basketball player. Geometry became a lesson in angles. History became a lesson in leadership. Shakespeare became a way to understand people. He treated life like a library.
One of my favorite examples came after Allen Iverson put up 41 points and 10 assists against him in 1999. Kobe said working harder wasn't enough, so he studied Iverson obsessively. Then he went outside basketball and studied how great white sharks hunt seals off the coast of South Africa. He was looking at patience, timing and angles. He wrote about it himself in Obsession Is Natural.
That idea stuck with me. If I really love photography, why wouldn't I study it the same way? Why wouldn't I learn about the photographers and artists who came before me, figure out how they thought about light, color, perspective and storytelling, then take those lessons back into my own work? That's what Study the Craft is about. Once a month, I want to learn from somebody else in the field and see what that study unlocks in me. Not copying their photographs. Learning from them.
Why Adrian Sommeling
The first photographer and digital artist I chose is Adrian Sommeling, a Netherlands based conceptual portrait artist whose early personal composite work is the part that first pulled me in.
His story is interesting because photography wasn't his first visual language. In a 2014 PHLEARN interview, Adrian talked about growing up around art. His mother painted, and he spent years drawing, painting, using oils and airbrushing. He photographed portraits in high school, but the darkroom process pushed him away from photography for a while. When digital photography came along, his interest came back. Photoshop became a kind of digital darkroom that made sense to somebody who already thought like a painter.
He has also said that American advertising photographer Dave Hill was a major influence on his visual style. Over time, Adrian became known for highly constructed, cinematic composites that mix photography and digital art. He later worked in advertising and commercial photography, but the work that connects most to this first Study the Craft is his earlier personal work.
A lot of those images centered on his son and sometimes his son's friends. They were playful, surreal and often impossible, but the goal was to make the impossible scene feel believable. Adrian said his son inspired him because watching him grow brought back memories of the things he loved and imagined as a child. That part matters to me. Those photographs weren't just Photoshop exercises. They came from family, memory, humor and imagination.
That's where I see the connection to something I was trying to do back in 2021. Not the same photograph and not the same concept, but the same creative question: what if I take a normal photograph of people I love and place them inside a world that doesn't really exist?
Looking back at my 2021 composite
This image is of my daughters, Laila and Shayla. I put them into this huge blue nighttime landscape, walking toward the mountains underneath an oversized moon. At the time, I wasn't studying Adrian Sommeling, and I wasn't trying to recreate one of his images. I was experimenting and trying to make something that felt bigger than the original photograph, something surreal that looked like they were walking into another world.
Looking at the image now, five years later, after spending time with Adrian's early personal work gives me a completely different way to study my own photograph. That's one of the things I already like about this series. Studying doesn't always have to tell you what to create next. Sometimes it helps you understand what you were already trying to do.
One of the biggest lessons I've taken from Adrian is that convincing composite work doesn't start in Photoshop. It starts when you're taking the photographs. In a Professional Photographer article about his composite work, Adrian explained that when the separate images are photographed with the correct perspective and light, the post processing becomes much easier. Realistic shadows are then what help connect the subjects to the background.
That sounds simple, but it's a big lesson. It's easy to look at a complicated composite and think the answer is getting better at Photoshop. Sometimes the bigger question is whether you photographed all the pieces with the final world in mind.
Where is the light supposed to be coming from? How high should the camera be? What angle would I actually see this person from if they were standing there? How should the shadow fall? What happens to contrast and color as something moves farther into the distance? Those are photography questions before they're Photoshop questions.
When I look back at my 2021 image now, I still like the idea. I still like the blue color palette, the huge moon, the scale of the landscape and my daughters walking away from the camera. But today I would pay much more attention to how the light on them relates to the environment. I would study the shadows, the edges, atmospheric depth and perspective more carefully. I would ask whether every piece truly feels like it was photographed inside the same world.
That doesn't make me dislike the old image. I actually appreciate it more. I can see what my creative mind was reaching for then, and now I have another photographer's experience helping me see how I could push the same kind of idea further today.
Learn the lesson, not the photograph
Something Adrian said in that PHLEARN interview fits this whole project almost perfectly. He encouraged photographers to look at photographs they love and analyze why they like them. Is it the light? The angle? The depth of field? Where is the light coming from? Then take what you learned and put it into your own work.
That's the line I want Study the Craft to walk. I don't want to make Adrian Sommeling photographs. I already have my own photographs to make. But I absolutely want to learn something from Adrian Sommeling.
Next month it might be a portrait photographer. It might be somebody from another generation. It might be an artist whose work looks nothing like mine. That's part of the point. If Kobe could learn something about basketball by studying sharks, there's no reason my education as a photographer has to stop with people who shoot exactly the way I do.
Photography is too deep of a craft for me to ever believe I'm finished learning it. People were making incredible images before I ever picked up a camera, and people are creating incredible work right now that I've never even seen. I want to know more of them. I want to understand why their work works. I want to learn some history, try things outside of what I'm comfortable doing, and sometimes fail because I attempted something I couldn't do yet.
And I want to share some of that process because maybe it'll encourage somebody else to start reading again, researching again and actually studying whatever craft they say they love.
Kobe didn't become Kobe by only showing up to play basketball. He studied. I'm taking that mentality into photography, not because I'm trying to become another photographer, but because I'm trying to become the best Stephen Kelly I can be.
See you next month. Keep studying your craft. 📸
If Adrian's work interests you, spend some time with his website. His site is not in English, so you may need to use your browser's translation feature to read it in English.
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