Shallow Grave

Well, I never imagined getting hooked on Twitter Photo Challenge would end with me digging myself out of my own grave. But that's exactly what happened today.

Well, not exactly but sort of. Anyway: This week's topic is "The four Elements, earth, wind, water, fire". I've done a few pictures involving the latter three, but it wasn't until today I got the idea for how to visualise earth.

It came to me in a meeting at work: A graveyard of course. And being the lover of bad movies that I am, what better way to visualise graveyards than by putting zombies in them?

So that's what I set out to do.

Technical horrors:

I taped a black plastic bag between two chairs so that it made a bridge between the chairs. I covered the plastic with soil and used a knife to slit a small opening in the bottom. Behind me I set up a flash to create the illusion of moon light.

And here came the important part: I moist my hand and covered it in dirt. Then I stuck it up trough the opening in the plastic and snapped away.

I experimented with exposure before getting the light like I wanted it. I took the photo in daylight, so I ended up with manual exposure 1/3 second and f/8.0 to get the front of my hand and the soil dark enough to look night-ish. The flash that fired from behind was set up with TTL and no exposure compensation whatsoever.

Some desturation and adjustment of white balance done in Adobe Camera Raw to bring out the proper moonlight feeling. In Photoshop Elements I did some slight tweaking of hue in the red and green channels, just because Zombies shouldn't have healthy skin :-)

Yep, that's all folks.