A vivid dream from July 14, 2010. So vivid that I needed to write it down and sketch it out.

July 14, 2010

I was with a girl, in a skyscraper where her fathers business was housed. There was housing on the top floors. I remember some things about being nervous around her father. I remember we went to sleep together in the same bed looking out a window into the night sky. The earth shook. We both woke up thinking that this was our first earthquake. We decided it wasn’t much and went back to sleep. Seconds later we were jolted awake by some very loud noises. We somehow knew (from other people?) that we had to evacuate the building. I didn’t remember how to evacuate, so we just took off. We didn’t have on shoes and were wearing sleeping gear. I still had my pillow as we rushed down some stairs and outside. Everything was completely dark outside, but things were violently visible. The sky was full of a menacing black storm.

(Read more…)

Location: My living room

Camera and Lens: Nikon D80, 50mm f/1.8 lens

Creative Process: For this image, I wanted to capture a kind of class ‘lipstick on the cheek’ look. I decided upon a bright red color lipstick. I wanted the expression to really stand out through my eyes, so I put on some eyeliner. I then wanted to simulate that I had been crying recently, so I smeared the makeup around, put water on my face, and worked the makeup into a look that I wanted. It turns out that achieving focus on the eyes in a self portrait situation is much easier when using eyeliner. I wanted the photo to have a really grainy almost filthy raw look to it.

Post Production: This image is fairly straight from the camera. In Lightroom I upped the exposure and black levels just a bit and then bumped up the clarity for extra grit. In Photoshop I edited out some blemishes and burned in some areas of makeup around the eye to make it stick out just a bit more.

Note: I’m using the format from another blog that I really really admire. The Still Image with Cash Taylor. If you are a photographer and not reading this blog, you should it rocks.