Dead art

So I shot a girl after I had her dig her own grave. And yes, it was that morbid. But just so you know, she drove away totally unharmed. I'd seen a shot a few weeks back that i really thought was well executed and thought I'd try my hand at doing something similar; you might get away with calling it a copy cat killer photo. ha ha. okay, I think I should lay off of the bad puns before i end up digging my own grave.

So, for the shot I ended up setting up my gear as she helped dig a small ditch enough to lay mostly in. I lost my light meter on my shoot a while back and can't afford to replace that piece of equipment yet. At 500 dollars it's a bit out of my budget, even though it is nearly indispensable to me. Without it, it took a bit longer to set up and I had to mostly guess at my flash settings but I think that in the end I got it about where I wanted it.

I balanced the ambient and flash so that the ambient was a half to full stop under so that the flash would pop on her but not look to much like flash. I was going for a look of just a hint of light over the background to separate her just enough and I think I did it fairly well under the circumstances.

As for the post processing I did very little in terms of retouching and stuck mostly to working with the color and general tonality. I've fallen in love with a new warm tone curve that I've developed, the mixture between two curves that I created for the vintage series I have been wanting to work on. They two curves are done as adjustment layers (as always) and I've played with the blending modes so they act differently then their original design. it's one of the things that I love about working digitally is that there is a world of processing that can be done in post.

I had originally considered doing a pure black and white (well, brown and white to be more specific) but decided that a hint of color gave it just the right touch of uneasiness that i was looking for. Since the black and white and warm tone conversion felt a bit static, I lowered the opacity of the conversion to let a hint of the color version back in. This created a nice duotune look that had warm shadows but cool highlights which I'm particularly fond of for this shot.

All in all I love the eerie look to this photo; and while it isn't something that i've dealt with in the past, my head is now racing with ideas that i would like to try. I think it helps to break out of the box once in a while to try new things and experiment and I think that this is one experiment that even a mad scientist would be proud of.

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