Eve and Adam 2009

The most fun thing about the Twitter Photo Challenge group, is that since each challenge/topic lasts for a week, ideas starts coming when you're "warming up".

This week's topic is "contrasts" and I've been through ideas such as new/old, dead/alive, etc. But today I started thinking about light and dark, and also male and female. Could they be combined? I think they can.

So here's a family photo -- my wife and I as aliens. I always dreamt of seeing an extra terrestrial. Now I at least can pretend to be one :-)

How it's done

This is a photo where everything's wrong, really, and still (in my eyes at least) it works. The background's overexposed a gazillion stops, the foreground's underexposed almost as much; the photo is completely out of focus and the bodies doesn't look at all what they do in real life. Rather like something you'd see in a mirror hall at a fairground or something. But still... I kind of like the effect.

I took this with a 50mm f/1.4. The camera was on manual, set to 1/200 shutter and f/2.8 aperture. The lens was on manual focus, and focused as close as possible (0,45m). My wife and I stood approx three meters from the camera, so we were thrown out of focus A LOT.

We stand in front of a door opening. I had draped a white curtain over the opening, using a lot of gaffer tape to keep it in place.

Behind the curtain I had a light stand with two flashes -- one approx on head level, the second on thigh level. Another flash on camera triggered these two flashes. The entire thing was set up using automatic exposure (ETTL), but told to overexpose by two stops.

I added a hint of a frame using Photoshop.

So here we are -- my wife and I, the E.T.s.