Warning: blurred nudity

Caine posted a link to some absolutely gorgeous and inspiring elizabethan-style costume photography, [affinity] it reminded me of some stuff I did last year.

Erwin Olaf and Sugimoto are two other photographers whose work I love, and they both specialize in costumed characters, surreal situations, and great big even soft-lit scenes. I’m not going to include any of their work because I can’t stand the comparison.

self-portrait, 2016

My artificial intelligence that does creativity for me sometimes kicks out some pretty strange stuff. I had been playing with virtual reality gear, and the idea of mixing it with something older seemed like a good one. I had gotten the lovely ruff on ebay a year earlier, and it had been sitting unused, so everything just came together. I was especially proud of the earring (it was the counterpart to an earring I rigged for a fake Vermeer I did (“the girl with the pink bunny earring”)

The lighting setup for this also seemed to lend itself well to another idea I had, which was a forebear superhero idea of my own. I used to have this prop flat I built for my studio – it’s a small movable wall with a hole cut through it and a picture frame. I’ve done some fun shots using that prop.

self-portrait 2016

One of the downsides of using lots of props and costumes is that they get worn out – you put them in too many pictures they become a visual anchor that drags your style down.

But I’m lazy. It takes about a half hour to set up the studio so I can do properly lit selfies, and when I’m in a costume I usually want to shoot a few concepts and then just go with the one I like best. The rest get buried. Photographers like Erwin Olaf (check out his stuff [olaf]) will spend $60,000 building a set, shoot a few dozen frames in it during the course of a day, and then tear it all to pieces. That’s some kind of photographers’ nirvana, to me.

Since I’m outing how lazy I am, this is a halloween card I shot in 2010. I believe that was the winter when I rigged the wall/picture frame prop. When I first did it, I screwed and taped a thin sheet of semi-transparent latex between the wall and the frame, then had my artist friend Yarrow “go be scary behind it” – in that situation, I was able to actually see what I was looking at, which makes it much easier to get the lighting and depth in frame right.

I’m sure all this was stuck in my subconscious from Repulsion.

If you ever want to scare the bejeebers out of someone for Halloween, the latex and picture frame is insanely great if you don’t expect it.

Yarrow, Oct 23 2010

Yarrow really nailed that one. I posted a full resolution of this for stock photography and I still occasionally get emails from people who are using this in various creepy ways. Here’s one that was done by someone on Deviantart:

composite by Visualmodality