Playing Dice Games With Cannibals.

He kept losing but he kept going back to play her game. He needed the food she promised if he won but he should have known you don’t play games with cannibals, especially not games of chance. Losses against her came at a high cost. She needed him to keep his arm so she could keep playing against him. She took an ear this time. His consultation prize wasn’t worth it.

This has been a great October. If you enjoyed our horror sessions then check back next October for those, but next month keep an eye out – we will be trying to recreate a classic painting in between featuring photography tips and tricks. And of course, if you want any family photography work or wedding photography work just send us an email.

In the meantime, this photo session was a little more careful with the setup. For lighting, we kept it mostly low with two strobes hooked up to softboxes with grids on to heavily control the lighting. Additionally, there was a speedlight overhead with a snoot and a grid on – again, to heavily control the light and keep a small circle of light on the table. Remember, in photography light and shadows are your brushes and what you do with them is how you will communicate your work.

As for props, the main one was the cut ear. Obviously, we didn’t cut our model’s ear off. We did create a mold cast of his ear with alginate and then used white resin mixed with mica powder for color. The mica powder went terrible. I don’t think I mixed enough in, and it ended up looking pink, so I ended up painting it – poorly. Thankfully it didn’t have to look good as I’d be burying it in blood it just had to look gnarly and mangled, which my shoddy fabrication skills really helped make happen on accident. Proving yet again that incompetence can very much result in success if you pour enough blood on it.

Monthly Monster - Needle Face

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.