Last weekend I had the opportunity to once again work with Jeanine (she of the “Into the Mouth of Madness” fame) on a very cool project that she and I cooked up shortly after doing our first shoot together. The idea was to have sort of a dead spirit with a demon dog trying to find her way through the underworld. The theme evolved over the week or two we waited before shooting, but it all came together in a great collaborative effort by everyone involved.

We ended up using my sister’s great dane in some photos, but I didn’t use any of those shots in this set (but will be editing some of that later). What follows is a series of 5 photos that I’ve processed that form a common theme. It was a lot of work, great coordination and with everyone’s help I think we pulled together one of my best shoots ever! Hit the jump for all the images, including some behind-the-scenes and even setup shots where I break down how we achieved some of these images. For the photography geeks, you’ll even get a chance to see my custom-built SB600 Lantern.

So our crew was made up of our model, Jeanine, her roommate and my newfound executive key-grip, Jodan, and makeup artist, Kaley. In the studio, Kaley offered to slit Jeanine’s throat. Well, not really, but in a makeup SFX kinda way. The neck wound turned out awesome — it looked positively gross! It was so realistic though that we were thinking we might get some pretty strange looks while she was in the car on the way over to the location!

The location was really cool. I had used it previously for an artistic nude shoot, but I thought it would give us an opportunity to look somewhat ominous but have a more outdoors feel to it. It was a bit precarious with all the rocks and creek to work around. I was the first to slip in and get a soaker on my foot, but then shortly after that Kaley our MUA did too, and Jeanine slipped on a slimy rock and went down up to her knees. But that broke the ice a bit and she decided to get a bit wet for the rest of the shoot, which ended up making things great. Jordan, our boom operator and camouflaged lighting guy even dumped off his shoes, helped Jeanine across the creek and even waded in to make sure we had great light on the model!

One last minute element that Jeanine through into the mix was that she brought a lantern in to use, complete with a tiny little candle inside. Since we were shooting outside in daylight, I knew we’d never even see the light in the lantern, let alone get any glow off it. So I decided to improvise! Jordan and I took the candle out of the lantern and I rigged up my Nikon SB600 flash with a yellow gel and stuffed it part way into the lantern (the door just barely allowed the flash head to fit the opening!). Hooked up my GI trigger and a bit of duct tape and VOILA…instant illuminated lantern! I think I had the power on 1/32 or 1/64 and it worked out great. It was a bit strong for real close-ups, but overall I was very please with how it worked out.

Since we were outside in the middle of the day, and we really wanted it to be fairly atmospheric and evoke some emotion, I used a Nikon SB25 on a light stand shooting through an umbrella on full-power. I had the benefit of using a voice activated light stand/boom (read: Jordan, my Key-Grip!) to get the light in close and up high for a sort of “moonlight” effect in the photos.

Virtually all post processing was done in Adobe Lightroom with some minor touch-ups in Photoshop on some to clean a few things up.

To sum it up, I was extremely pleased with how this turned out. We had a lot of fun on the shoot (never a dull moment working with Jeanine…she’s really going to get me into trouble one day, I know it!), and I really don’t know how we’re going to top this with our next big creative endeavour.

Would love to hear what you think and I certainly encourage constructive feedback!