Christmas Spirit

I heard on the radio that their Christmas spirit was the only one with heart and soul. We disagree. The Christmas spirit we conjured has heart and soul too – granted it’s someone else’s heart and someone else’s soul. I don’t think they will be getting a return on their heart and soul either. Anyway, be careful what spirits you invite to visit.

This idea literally came from the radio and sort of worked from there. As for props, the heart is made of white resin and painted. The crystal ball is just me not being able to resist using it again. I am overly fascinated by what it does to light flashes. It’s just so weird. I’ll likely overuse it. The headpiece came from online but days before I found stuff in the dollar store that could have done the same for cheaper. We used a little fake blood left over from Halloween. The rest my model put together on her own and she handled her own face makeup for this session.

As for lighting, things are a bit more complicated. For the first two photos it is a 4 light shot. Two speed lights to the sides of the model bouncing light at an angle upwards. 1 strobe in back to bounce light against the fog machine fog. Finally, one light positioned just behind the crystal ball with a boom stand which is edited out into the fog. For the rest of the photos, we got rid of the back light and just used the other 3.

Nightmares Before Christmas!

To start off our Nightmares Before Christmas fun we invited our here who is burning bright with that Christmas feeling. Unfortunately, he seems to have mistaken “feeling” with “gasoline and fire,” which happens sometimes. But hey, at least he has a friend at this time of the year. Maybe not a willing friend but a warm friend, nonetheless.

This was a year in the making. Our first attempt at this was last year but this sort of shot is challenging to do because you need two things to work perfectly and just getting anything to work perfectly is a challenge. To do this, you need the fire to burn bright and high. Meanwhile, you also need your autofocus to be able to “see” what you are focusing on and in the dark (remember, the fire is in back so we had to use a low artificial light up front). Last year the fire worked, the autofocus failed, and the small LCD screen in back lied. This year we used a different light and we learned from our mistake. I had my assistant practice earlier in the day with me, and then again just before we lit the fire and things worked out.

Anyway, I set up two strobes with grids. One strobe directly to my right and one just up front and to my left. The fire acted as a backlight. My assistant helped dirty my face up with some of her SFX stuff and then I had her take the photo. Then I took her photo. As for our friend, whom we named Yorick, well I’ll post about that on Friday if I don’t have anything else to post between now and then. Otherwise, I’ll get to it when I get to it.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas, and if you don’t like what we did here you definitely won’t like what we will be doing next week. Let’s just say we will be getting into the “spirit” of the season next week.