Dark: Irony

This is my entry into the Art Explosion contest hosted by @juliakponsford, a photograph entitled, "Dark: Irony".

As children - and sometimes still as adults - we have found a fascination with staying up late into the dark night to watch scary movies that cause screams, shrieks, and endless nightmares and sleepless nights. I wondered, if you happen to be the undead, would you stay up into the light of day to do the same?

Method

I like Halloween and have a number of decorations including poseable skeletons and interactive goodies, such as a television that pushes beyond it's boundaries into the room. I enjoy setting up scenes with such figures.

Of course, I need to move a lot of the furnishings around to do what I want: after snapping the original photo above to look at the framing I realised that the plants in the background had to go. So there were a number of adjustments and readjustments.

One of the biggest struggles I had was taking the picture at the right time with the tv. When the face protrudes it changes colour, and since I was using the tv as the primary internal lightsource (in addition to the natural light filtering in through the curtains), it had be be lit, and the face had to be protruding. This photo below is a neat silhouette, but the skeleton is screaming at an empty tv. Not what I wanted. So click, and click again.

Post processing was the deal after finally getting the picture I wanted: colour correction, black and white, so on, so forth. For what I was aiming for black and white was a necessity, but tricky without losing too much detail.

I finally got almost the look with that photo, then thought that a more nightmarish/dreamish approach by fading the edges would fit the mood a little better.

So here you have it: Dark: Irony. A skeleton child, scared by a skeleton, in the light of day.

(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe

(design by remyrequinart: https://steempeak.com/@remyrequenart)