To start off our Nightmares Before Christmas fun we invited our here who is burning bright with that Christmas feeling. Unfortunately, he seems to have mistaken “feeling” with “gasoline and fire,” which happens sometimes. But hey, at least he has a friend at this time of the year. Maybe not a willing friend but a warm friend, nonetheless.
This was a year in the making. Our first attempt at this was last year but this sort of shot is challenging to do because you need two things to work perfectly and just getting anything to work perfectly is a challenge. To do this, you need the fire to burn bright and high. Meanwhile, you also need your autofocus to be able to “see” what you are focusing on and in the dark (remember, the fire is in back so we had to use a low artificial light up front). Last year the fire worked, the autofocus failed, and the small LCD screen in back lied. This year we used a different light and we learned from our mistake. I had my assistant practice earlier in the day with me, and then again just before we lit the fire and things worked out.
Anyway, I set up two strobes with grids. One strobe directly to my right and one just up front and to my left. The fire acted as a backlight. My assistant helped dirty my face up with some of her SFX stuff and then I had her take the photo. Then I took her photo. As for our friend, whom we named Yorick, well I’ll post about that on Friday if I don’t have anything else to post between now and then. Otherwise, I’ll get to it when I get to it.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas, and if you don’t like what we did here you definitely won’t like what we will be doing next week. Let’s just say we will be getting into the “spirit” of the season next week.