My love of virtual photography is not just a motivation to take my own photographs. It’s also a great fuel for me to take actions and actually contribute to this recent discipline evolution. I am very grateful that I have the opportunity to collaborate to the creation of some photo modes, with more or less impact on the final product, depending on what the studios need or how far they are ready to implement my advices and feedbacks. I provide advices from a hardcore photo mode and PC camera tools user perspective, as well as an active member of the virtual photography community, well aware of their needs and expectations. I also know how to adapt to the needs of a studio and be there to enhance their vision of the photo mode feature, in the respect of the game.
If you are a studio looking for help and experience in photo-mode design, feel free to reach out to me anytime, preferably a couple of months before the deadline you set for your photo mode to release. It’s easy to overlook the amount of work that is needed for such feature. If you want powerful marketing material in the long run, you need to make a photo mode accessible to all gamers, on all platforms to help express their creativity and to keep your game visible and current on the internet. This is where I can help. Key bindings, features implementation, pedagogic explanations, documented pointers and more…
Games I am credited in.
Mortal Shell
A game with a strong visual identity and artistic direction developped by Cold Symmetry and published by Playstack.
The photo mode that was born from our collaboration, gives close to total freedom to the player to embrace this beautiful world aesthetic, and go beyond with their own imagination.
Key features such as slow motion, free camera without range limit, control over RGB, contrasts, brightness, fog and so many more aspects… Everything has been thought to glorify freedom, just like this small team of AAA studios veterans, who care for creating their game to their image.
DEATHLOOP
Deathloop has been showing how creativity should be done. At every level. When they started working on their photo mode, they absolutely kept that at heart and were eager to hear and learn how to give the best tool possible to players.
I’m so thrilled to have been able to help the amazing teams at Arkane Lyon to bring their vision of photo mode to life. Their always open-minded thinking process allowed necessary features, such as a very long camera range limit, some composition grids, brightness, contrast and saturation settings, flash feature, character poses and position adjustment and many many more, to be born. The challenge of creating a photo mode fun, easy to use, but also providing enough features to more in depth virtual photography in a big production was absolutely humbling and mind blowing!
The Shore
The Shore is an indie horror game set in a Lovecraftian universe. They wanted to add a photo mode feature simple and efficient, and that’s why they asked me about the most important aspects of a photo mode. I didn’t have the opportunity to fully test it and do much in depth adjustments before release, unfortunately. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see small studio putting the energy into a photo mode feature.
Cyberpunk 2077
I was contacted by CD Projekt Red, along with 5 other virtual photographers to provide advices and later QA test and feedback the 2.2 update, released on December 11th 2024. This update features a very consequent upgrade of the photo mode, with the objective to give more freedom and creative options to players. Main features on which we had an impact are a tremendous camera range, a free camera, a custom light system, no collision with the environment and so on. I am very proud that I was able to bring help to such a big game that will probably lead many other studios to make bold moves in their photo mode creation.
Also good to know…
I’ve also been consulted by other games and publishers. Sometimes their lack of budget for their photo mode development or simply lack of time didn’t allow them to go through with everything they’d have wanted to, or sometimes they just picked some of my advices as a general feedback and I never had the opportunity to work closely with the teams as I did for other games.
For instance, I’m happy to have been able to talk and help a bit some games like The Callisto Protocol through talks with Glen Schofield (game director) or Ghostwire : Tokyo through detailed feedbacks to Bethesda (publisher) before they update the ingame photo mode, even though I cannot take official credit about those. As long as my experience was able to give a slight help to them, that’s what matters the most, which is why I also started a series of videos you can see down below.
Everything Wrong With This Photo Mode.
(EWWThisPM)
Is a new series I started on YouTube in order to help developers to create their own Photo Mode, by showing what features should or shouldn’t be implemented, or how it should be implemented. Using reknown photo modes (good or bad) and dive into them in depth, to help understand what is needed by virtual photographers.