Monster of the month – Needle Face
The inspiration for this one came from dealing with an insurance company for 2 months to try and just get event photography insurance for a wedding I will be photographing soon. It should not take 2 months for me to give a business money but apparently this business did not want money because they kept screwing up the paperwork or something. To be honest, I am still not entirely sure what the problem was. Then it came to me when I was talking to the 4th salesperson and the thought crossed my mind that dealing with them was worse than sticking upholstery needles in my skin. I got the insurance squared away last night (went with a different company, who got it sorted in an hour, apparently, they did want money). We won in the end any way as we got inspiration for this set up.
I also used Pinhead as a guide to inspire the lighting. In fact, a lot of horror movie posters the lighting is more or less the same, a light aimed up at the subject in front as a key light and maybe a light in back as a rim light or from the top to fill – the key light tends to be consistent as the shadows created add to the effect. For this set up we used two speedlights. One speed light down in front of me aimed up at me and one speed light in back as a rim light hitting some fog from a fog machine. No modifiers as the harsh light and harsh shadows add to the set up.
As for special effects, well my SFX assistant used Synwax and liquid latex. The needles were upholstery needles which to this day freak me out. I made one mistake with those, I thought I needed the longest needles but in hindsight they are about the same width and since they were all cut the size didn’t really matter. I cut them with a Dremel tool and whew does that create a lot of sparks so wear eye protection and safety stuff if you do something with this.
I had to have both my assistants on hand as the needles I picked up were a tad heavy for the wax (we ended having to use fewer needles then we wanted because of this but we learned from the experience) so my SFX assistant was on standby to fix any issues as well as work the fog machine and my other assistant took the picture.
Special thanks to my two assistants. This session would have been stupidly difficult to do alone.