Friday, October 10, 2014

Halloween Self-Portrait for 2014

I love Halloween.  It's my absolute favorite holiday.  I've always been a huge fan of horror and all things creepy, so its become a tradition the last few years to create a horror themed photo of Heidi and myself to celebrate Halloween.  2012 started this fun little exercise with us as Zombies.  I think we were watching a little too much "Walking Dead" at the time!  2013 brought on a "30 Days of Night" style Vampire photo.  This year, we went a little farther back into the archives of horror cinema for inspiration. Our concept was to show a modern horror version of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.  I think the Zombie portrait is still my favorite overall, but the new one is definitely fun!


Classic Horror Movie Little Red Riding Hood 2014

"30 Days of Night" style Vampires 2013

Zombies! 2012

I'm not going to go through a step-by-step, but I will briefly touch on the process.  This was a quick and dirty pic, and I took a few short cuts I normally wouldn't take with set-up. After we had the theme nailed down, I set up my studio lights and took a few quick shots of Heidi and myself for the characters.  (These were very quick!) Once I found one of us I was happy with, I isolated them and found a suitable Fall background to stick them on from a trip to Nashville a few years ago.

Dropping the figures onto the background was the easy part.  Now I had to blend them all together and make a scene!  Originally, I wanted to do a Hemlock Grove style transformation, but, I was having trouble showing the process of transformation in a still frame and keep it semi-recognizeable as a self-portrait.  After a little trial and error, we decided a classic horror movie werewolf would be great instead.  Some dodge and burn, some airbrushing and overlays, a couple of simple filters and ta-daa, I was a werewolf! These are always so much fun to do!  I might start charging for these.... hmmmm.

The pieces I used in the composite and color version of the 2014 photo is below.

Little Red Riding Hood

 The Big Bad Werewolf

Fall Background I took in TN

Finished color version



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