Uploads from Christophe Kiciak

The Dark Side of the Financial Crisis

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:32:09 -0700

One photo, one exposure, no composite.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

It is a period of financial crisis. Due to budget cuts, the evil Galactic Empire is getting weaker, day after day. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, are regularly winning battles.

The evil lord Darth Vader, seeing his end getting close, gathers his strengths, for the last battle. As the exceptional podracer pilot he always was, he decides to ride the very last experimental machine constructed by the Empire's best engineers. However, the insidious recession got there too, and things are not going as expected....

Yes, I am shamelessly having too much fun. I really hope I will manage to put some smiles on some faces with that photo.

Technically, it was a pain to obtain that result in one shot. In a nutshell, I constructed a structure around Vader, so that I could hang him to it using fishing lines. Of course, the whole thing had to be relatively light, so that it could be installed anywhere. Here is a little list (probably non comprehensive) of items used in that shot:
- 4 long metallic bars (measuring 2 meters each)
- Screws and bolts, in order to attach bars together two by two and construct two 4 meters long bars
- A rope, to link the two 4 meters bars at their top, and create an horizontal line over the scene
- Some fishing line, strong enough to resist the weight of Vader and his podracer
- A Darth Vader suit, that I stuffed with random fabric I had around (I had to buy the suit for the occasion)
- Planks of wood, to construct the oars
- Some paint for the oars
- Motorbike gloves for Vader's hands
- Of course, a large cardboard box
- Lots of duct tape and various wood pieces, in order to fix Vader and the oars in the box

A first try was made by my wife and me. It failed miserably: holding everything in place was too hard for the two of us. Fortunately, we were supposed to visit my parents this week, so I charged the car with all that stuff and took everything there.

My parents were very kind, and accepted to help us. In fact, I believe they find it quite funny too ;) That second try went much better: my dad was holding one of the 4 meter vertical bar (left side), while my wife and my mum were holding the other one (right side). I believe I had the easiest task with my camera taking photos: the structure proved to be heavy, as the podracer was pulling it towards the middle. The wind was also an enemy, but in the end we managed to get a few good shots. Back at home, I quickly processed one of them (by cloning out the fishing lines and adjusting the colors a bit), and that was it. I won't hide that I am very happy about the result.

A big special thanks to my wife and my parents for their great help.

The Last Journey

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 17 May 2013 02:31:14 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and editing by me.

Death is obviously a topic we will have to deal with, sooner or later. As such, I suppose we all think about it from time to time. In this study, I wanted to express the feelings of the deceased person's lover, depicting his own world collapsing, as she is departing for her last journey.

Some fun facts about the photos:
- My wife and I posed for the couple. I wanted the shroud to make nice folds on her body, so I put it in the water. It was quite cold, and the shooting session was punctuated by interesting shouts and laughs!
- My wife is also posing for the menacing presence, incoming from the background. In a way, she embodies her own death in that image.
- The dead faces in the rifts are made of a plastic skull wrapped in duct tape, to make them look a bit like dried corpses rather than normal skulls.
- If you look carefully in the upper left corner, you will spot a pair of scissors. My wife wanted them to be included there, as a reference to the Parcae. In ancient Roman religion and myth, the Parcae were the female personifications of destiny, often called the Fates in English. They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal and immortal from birth to death (which occurred when they cut the thread with their scissors).

The Enterprise

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:52:12 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

This building is the EDF Tower (the largest electric utility company in the world), located in La Défense, next to Paris. As you can see on the photo, its entrance is built under a wide circular canopy (24m, i.e. 79 feet in diameter).

I am obviously not an experimented architecture photographer, but since that entrance reminded me so much of the infamous Star Trek spaceship, I decided to give it a try for laughs.

I first tried to photograph it with a linear lens: the largest in my bag was my tilt-shift 17mm. Unfortunately, the building was a bit too long to get it entirely in the frame. Stepping back was not an option, as a street lamp was just behind, causing major flare when getting too close to it. So I decided to use my fisheye lens, which did the job quite well imo. I like how it made the canopy prominent, as well as the wrapping curves of the buildings in the background. I installed my tripod and took several shots at different exposures, including an overblown one to get some stars in the dark sky.

Back at home, I decided to process the photo to give it an even more obvious starship feeling, and recolored entirely the scene to those cyan/blue tones. I got kind of lucky with the stars, as clouds would not have worked so well regarding the "space" mood.

Arise

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:44:05 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

This is a photo, one exposure, no montage.

For those that are interested by the technical side of things, here is how that photo was done:

1) The phoenix was drawn from scratch on a black piece of cardboard, then cut out to obtain a stencil. This step was done by my wife, who has much better drawing skills than I do, not mentioning the patience to cut that cardboard during hours.
2) The phoenix was installed in the studio, fixed by its upper part to an horizontal bar. The point of this fixation is to be able to remove the phoenix and put it back in place easily, at will. To begin the shot process, I temporarily removed the phoenix.
3) I turned off all the lights in the studio: from there I worked in the dark.
4) I opened the camera shutter (bulb mode of course).
5) That is the trickiest part: I created some smoke (in that case with a smoke machine), then quickly threw an heavy object in the water to create the splash: simultaneously, I triggered the flashes (one flash + orange gel on smoke, another flash + blue gel on water/splash) with a remote I kept in my other hand. Yes, I had to try several times (throwing something in a glass of water in a dark room with smoke everywhere is a bit annoying).
6) I put the phoenix back in place, then placed a red gel in front of the camera lens.
7) I started to light paint the phoenix, using a candle from behind the stencil. Of course it was important to not stop moving, in order to avoid any blown area.
8) I put a yellow gel in front of the camera lens, then did some more light painting. The point of this second step was to obtain two different colors in the bird, which would (hopefully) look like fire.
9) I closed the shutter - done!

The processing was not too complex: the main point was to adjust the colors (especially on the bird) to make them look closer to what I had in mind.

The cake is a lie

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:37:08 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and editing by me.

What do you do when:
1) Your wife can cook a cake, looking exactly the way you want for the purpose of an image project
2) Additionally, the cake appears to be extremely tasty
3) Your wife is also willing to wear weird dresses, and pose with them for shooting sessions

Well, the answer is that your marry her. Again. Just to make sure. And you eat the cake! ;-)

Together

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:46:56 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and editing by me.

Happy Easter everyone!

Underwater Hurdling

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:59:24 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and editing by me.

This one is mostly for fun! Why lose your time with usual and boring sports when you could do silly and crazy ones? ;-)

- All the fishes and the turtle were photographed at the Paris Tropical Aquarium. As usual with such places, high ISO settings are required!
- I shot some water texture at the river next to my house.
- The ground was also photographed in the same area.
- I bought some cheap fins and diving mask, and posed with them in my home studio: let me tell you that jumping decently with these things is hard, haha! Way too hard for me anyway. I had to shoot the lower part of the body separately (I hang myself to a beam with my arms), then used another photo of the upper part of my body to create the composite. The lighting setup was prepared with the final image in mind: 2 softboxes from behind/above the model, then a third frontal strobe for some filling.
- My wife kindly built a hurdle out of wood, and painted it.
- The bubbles were photographed at home, in a small aquarium that I put in my studio.

Thanks for watching!

Schism

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:56:10 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and processing by me.

Why are we doing what we do, instead of not doing it? We all have habits, things that we do without really thinking about them. However, from time to time, we hesitate. Dilemmas, uncertainty, hard choices, doubts.

I do not know how everyone is handling such situation. As far as I'm concerned, I often try to weight pros and cons, as objectively as I can. Those two sides love to fight in my head: this is what I wanted to represent in my image. One side of my personality can be hard, disapproving any compromise (represented by the porcelain man, breaking instead of bending), while the other side can be much softer (the darkest man). Here, they are fighting over a decision, which is symbolized by the bird. I had a precise situation in my head when creating my picture, but in the end, it doesn't matter much, as any difficult decision could have been represented similarly.

Technically, here are the main photos that I took for this project:
- The background is completely real, I did not alter it at all. It is a crypt located in the upper part of the Mont Saint-Michel. Since the place is about 3h away from home, it took me a day to obtain it, but I think it was worth it. Incredible place.
- I posed for the 2 men photos. As you can imagine, the positions had to be well prepared, first as a drawing, then in reality. I used various tricks to help me hold the appropriate position; for example, when posing for the liquid man, I was holding a rope in my mouth that was attached to the wall behind me, to help me bend my neck and back.
- The bird photo required around 3 hours of hunting, as ravens love to flee when you want to photograph them.
- The splashes were realized by throwing items in a large bowl of milk.
- Finally, for the broken porcelain, I bought 4 white vases that I broke in my home studio. Photos were taken during the act, to obtain realistic projections, then also when the pieces were on the floor.

I am well aware that symbolism can be hard to understand at times, but I hope some will like it anyway!

Distant Lovers

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:32:59 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and processing by me. This image was created for a 48h speed challenge.

I love my wife. I wish we could spend more time together. It is not that simple: our respective jobs tend to keep us busy at very different times. For example, I often have to work in the evening to finish things, and she has to work several nights per week, as well as almost every Saturday, and even some Sundays. As a result, it is relatively rare that we actually are together when others are celebrating something. This situation obviously inspired me the concept of my image.

Since this was done for a speed challenge, I did not have many options to create my entry. First, a very quick shooting session occurred on day #1: I took a few photos of my wife, with a few variations regarding lighting and posture. During the night, I managed to get a photo of the moon. Then, on day #2, I photographed various clouds during the afternoon. When the evening arrived, I was alone at home, and spent it entirely working on that little project: last photos (balloon, envelope, peaks, myself), and about 8 hours of processing, to finish just in time.

The Flying Dutchman

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:42:05 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and editing by me.

Everyone knows the "Flying Dutchman", that legendary ship that can never make port, doomed to sail the oceans forever. I don't know why, but this name sounded always quite strange to me, so I decided to create an absurd image of what it could have been ;-)

This astonishing fish was photographed in an aquarium ("La Cité de la Mer", Cherbourg, France): it is always tricky to get a good shot in those low light conditions, but I am quite happy of the result. Hope you like it too!

Slaves

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 23:26:29 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and editing by me.

In our modern lives, with tools for almost any task, it is quite easy to forget how things are actually done. After all, if the hard work is always handled by something or someone else, it is easy to become lazy, or to live with the illusion that everything is easy and doesn't require some investment.

This is a little observation I wanted to express through my image: the cook in that case is in a sense the slave of her mixer, and from another point of view, the mixer is also a bit her slave.

Technically, I had to create this giant mixer so that the scene would fit inside it. The real one is much smaller: I duplicated parts as needed to extend its volume. The castle photos come from a ruin (Ivry-la-Bataille) that was totally buried in the 15th century, and discovered about 50 years ago: it made for an interesting visit.

Last but not least, the eggs have not been wasted: the cake my wife cooked after that photo was yummy!

Exodus

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:11:48 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and editing by me.

The opening of the Red Sea is undoubtedly one of the most famous story ever. From the first time I have heard it, I imagined how it would feel to actually walk between those two giant walls of water. I am sure it would be amazing, but also scary at the same time. Interesting to say the least. For that reason, I chose to depict that scene from the inside, rather than from a distance.

The edit was quite simple: I was surprised to finish it relatively quickly. In fact, the tricky part was to take the appropriate photos, which required some planning:
- First, I spent some time sketching the composition, in order to determine the photos I needed.
- Then, I traveled to the sea, about two hours from home.
- The water walls themselves are made of photos of the sea surface, half an hour before sunset. I knew I wanted those reflections, in order to let me position a light source at the end of the "tunnel". I turned the photos vertically on the canvas, then bent them as needed.
- I also needed photos of sea foam, but this time, I had to shoot it from a different angle: the foam had to be more or less aligned with the sun, to be lit appropriately. So I had to walk to a different part of the beach (different orientation compared to the sun), get into the water to the belt, and shoot photos from there, with the waves bashing me from the side. It was a bit cold, but it worked decently.
- At home, I shot the characters, and a few hours of processing later, it was done.

Christmas Madness

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 04:59:16 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All photos and processing by me.

This year, I visited my parents for Christmas. I knew a new contemporary art museum had opened next to their place, and the curiosity dragged me there. Among other things, I especially liked the work of Sandy Skoglund: in her photos, she would often paint a whole room in one color, then add repetitive items of another color, resulting in incredible surreal images.

She inspired me, and I decided to wrap up a few things: sofa, table, lamp, pedestal, chair, walls, chimney... and add some Christmas balls! Special thanks to my father who agreed to pose for that one.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

Survival

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 23:10:52 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

As time passes, I feel more and more disillusioned by human beings. Of course, I can't deny the fact that, as a whole, Humanity achieved impressive things, but as sub-groups or even individuals, results are frankly pathetic. I remember that, as a kid, I was looking at adults with much respect, as models, as goals: now that I am one of them, I see the truth, and I am ashamed.

The key word here is intolerance. It's simply everywhere, everyday. I don't think I need to be specific, but I can point out a few obvious examples: money, religion, sex orientation, skin color, nationality, education level, artistic tastes, etc. Everything is an excuse to start some kind of war, of crusade, against. Always against. Crush the rest to prove your value. Pathetic.

When it comes to those"end of world" discussions, I thought a bit about the subject, and failed to see much reason to actually regret human beings disappearance, besides the usual egocentric thoughts. I don't see how our presence is useful to anything, except to ourselves. So I simply imagined how I would feel the last day, and tried to depict it metaphorically: cold, dry, hopeless, defenseless, scared to the bone, still breathing thanks to the survival instinct, which would be obviously useless in such case.

The image is by no mean a realistic situation: reality is not my point, generally speaking. I don't care about it when I create my pictures, I am much more driven by emotions, impressions, feelings. A vision of the mind, not of the eye. I'm sure you can understand my point of view, even if you disagree with it. Some technical considerations:
- Everything was shot in my home studio, using the very same lighting setup to keep it consistent. This means I had to cover the floor with ashes (coming from my barbecue and chimney cleanings)
- I used 4 different photos of the two subjects holding themselves: my wife and I were posing, and it is always tricky to do it correctly without anyone to guide you. In fact, no photo was satisfactory, so I selected one for the general position, one for the heads position, one for the left arms position, and finally one for the legs.
- The smoke was shot there too, using a smoke machine.
- The hand and face in the ashes were also shot on the place.
- The ghostly faces in the smoke are mine (deformed of course, I don't look that bad).

Hope some will like it!

E = mc²

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:25:26 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

This photo was realized without post-processing.

If you follow my work, you probably know I like taking advantage of post-processing, in order to create composites. I like the fantasy it allows. However, I sometimes get messages from people challenging me to create something without such tool, and I decided to give it a try.

It might be a bit surprising, but in order to create this photo, I found myself using the very same set of skills I acquired when doing my extensively edited images. In fact, even if you use different tools, different ways of doing things, the underlying principles remain the same.

First of all, as always, the main difficulty is to come up with a convincing concept, a good idea. Obviously, post-processing is of no help about that: knowing how to handle a tool does not tell you what to do with it. So I started to think about "numbers", personifying them sounded interesting: from there, I had to choose someone who was notoriously related to that topic. Albert Einstein was an obvious candidate. I decided to pay him an homage, using the numbers "299792458" (the speed of light in meters per second, i.e. the value 'c' in the infamous formula).

When one creates a composite in post-processing, there are several difficulties to take into account, but a major one is the composition. Placing all the items harmoniously on the canvas can be painful, but fortunately, when you do it with some software, you can make lots of tries easily. I believe creating composites taught me more about composition than any other exercise. Here, this experience was useful, since changing the position of all these pieces of paper once they are glued is a gigantic pain. Moreover, I wanted to add some perspective to the portrait (just like when you deform a layer in Photoshop), except that I had to do it directly on the setup itself: for that, I built pillars made of cardboard, that I put under the face to lift it as needed (for example the nose has the highest pillar, so that it is the closest part to the camera).

Another usual tools used in post-processing are "dodging and burning". These are very important, to add depth and local contrast, or even to create shadows in composites. Despite the fact this was a "minimal editing" challenge, I wanted to use them anyway, since they usually make a very important difference when it comes to visual impact. What I did is that I printed all the numbers on different shades of gray: the pieces of paper are not all the same. For example, the ones in the background are the darkest ones, while the ones positioned on the left of the face (Einstein's left, your right) are the brightest ones. As you can imagine, choosing the appropriate color of paper for each zone of the setup required some work and thinking (in fact the same reasoning than in post-processing, but done directly with the items themselves).

Creating that setup took about 12 hours of work. As usual, my wonderful wife did an incredible job on it, and without her help I doubt this would have been possible within the challenge week. When it was done, I worked on the lighting setup, which required 3 more hours. Nothing unusual here, but I wanted the vignette to be as perfect as possible: I used different pieces of black cardboard around the setup to create shadows in the corners as needed. Positioning those precisely was a bit long. Technically, 2 strobes were used, both from the right: a softbox at mid-power, to give an ambient light to the scene, and a snoot at full power on the face, to get good contrast and shadows.

All in all, I am very happy about the result. The "pre-processing" (as opposed to "post-processing") worked as intended. In fact, I tried to optimize it afterwards, and except a few hair and dusts I would have cloned out, there is not much I would have adjusted. For those that are wondering, I did not use the camera settings capabilities: as a photographer, I see no valid reason to let the camera adjust or decide things for me, I want to have a full control over my work. This is why I simply set it to B/W and called it a day: the rest comes from my work on the setup and its lighting.

Very Bad Trick

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 22:57:57 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and processing by me.

For some reason, it seems to be much harder to get positive feedback from the art community when you are into humor. I am not talking about my little self, but in general: for example, comedies are generally not much rewarded at the Oscars ceremony, or humorists are often considered as worthless actors by their peers. It is a bit like if humor was too popular, too accessible, to get recognition from the intellectual sphere. This is a bit sad, since creating a really funny work of art is not easy at all, and certainly requires specific talent (Monty Pythons, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, just to name a few classics).

Anyway, I personally always enjoy creating humorous images. It is a very good occasion to try silly things in order to be funny - of course it often fails, but who cares. So I tried to imagine a situation where someone was doing something the wrong way for the fun part, but also where some fantasy was going on. This is how I arrived at that magical side, and this poor magician having troubles with the usual "rabbit-in-the-hat" trick.

From a technical point of view, I did my best to come up with a dynamic composition: the tilted hat looked quite good in the foreground, creating a diagonal with the magician in the background. However, at this stage the 2 main components where too dissociated, so I worked hard to make them appear more "linked", if that makes sense. In order to do that, I used some smoke, but mainly the wand: its direction and the blue light coming out of it was the best "tricks" I found for that purpose.

Regarding my face, I tried a lot of possibilities, but they were all just bad (yes, even more than this one). In order to look really grumpy, I decided to take this self portrait just after waking up: one always look totally off in the morning, at least for a few minutes ;-) So all the lighting was set the evening before, and when I left the bed I directly went to the studio and took a few photos during 5 minutes. My wife laughed when she saw the result, this is how I knew it worked as intended ;-)

Eve

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 22:52:45 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

While some ideas or photo concepts reach my mind quite naturally, I must confess that this one was hard to come up with. Speaking about the origins of life in a metaphorical way is definitely a challenge, since people can obviously have very different interpretations of the subject. This is why I choose to combine several concepts together: Eve and the forbidden fruit, a broken egg, plants, life, death. While I am not myself a religious man, so many incredible pieces of art have religion as an inspiration: I would be a fool to ignore that fact. So I decided to follow the steps of many famous artists in History, modestly and respectfully, since my goal was not to be provocative in any way. I must say I am very proud of the result, and I hope some will like this combination of classicism and modernism.

Regarding the making of the image, my dear wife was once again wonderful. Not only did she accept to pose, but she also had great ideas to help with the composition (particularly the plant shape) and colors: I would never had reached this result without her. Besides the main photo, I also took shots of a broken egg shell (I used it combined with her body), plants, leaves. The hair is also my wife’s, although it has been shot separately, and recolored.

With this image, I believe I am getting closer to what I truly want to express through my work, style-wise and meaning-wise. I am of course aware that some could hate it for several reasons, but I feel the need to keep trying new things and walking forward on the creation path.

Jack-o'-Scarecrow

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:22:28 -0800

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

As usual, everything shot and edited by me.

A month ago, I spotted a dead tree while driving on the highway. There was lots of fog that day, and it looked perfectly creepy, covered with myriads of ravens on its branches. I immediately thought: "I need this one for a Halloween image!".

So I went there a few weeks later. When I arrived I realized that unfortunately, it was standing in the middle of a sand quarry. It was of course forbidden to enter, but since there was no worker, I parked my car a bit further away and climbed over the fence. The area was mostly a swamp with high herbs, and very quickly I got wet and covered in mud to the belt. Fantastic. When I finally reached the damn tree, there was not a single raven in view, to my disappointment. I took some photos of the tree nonetheless, and headed back to my car, with a new mission: find ravens on the way back to home.

Who knew these damn birds were such a pain to photograph?! I saw some of these in fields along the road: cars were passing by, and they just didn't care about, so I was quite confident that it would be an easy task... but as soon as I actually stopped the car, they immediately flew away! Each and every time! Damn birds. No way to reach them by walking to them, the results were even worse. Damn birds. In the end I was driving slowly, windows opened, the 600mm on the knees, playing the sniper through the windows, as fast as possible, as soon as the car was stopped. The 5D2 auto-focus not being the fastest one out there, it proved to be rather challenging, but I managed to grab some decent shots after a few hours of chase.

Back at home, my wife took care of the pumpkin carving, while I prepared the scarecrow outfit. We photographed both in the home studio, using quite different settings, since the light emitted by the candle in the pumpkin required a long exposure. I also took some feather photos while I was at it. Finally, around midnight, I took the barbecue outside, and snapped some flames and smoke.

The post-processing phase was not too complicated from a technical point of view (just the regular masking/blending stuff), but it wasn't easy to place the birds in a believable way. Lots of tries and discussions with my wife, but it was worth it, since we both like the final result.

Rocks Have Feelings Too

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:29:18 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

All the photos and processing by me.

A few days ago, I found an article mentioning "Pet Rocks', and describing them as normal stones that people would buy in the 70's to pretend they have a pet, in a humorous way. Prior to that reading, I had no idea about what 'Pet Rocks' were, and I had to ask the great Internet for some more enlightenment. Needless to say the answer left me doubtful, to say the least. However, it looked like a good occasion to create a funny image. Since I don't know where to buy LSD these days, I went back to the good old brainstorming method, and tried to imagine various situations involving pets. After a few different sketches, I decided to go with those 2 persons, walking their respective pets, in a scene including an undergoing rock love affair ;-)

At first, I spent a whole afternoon walking in the woods, and took about 500 photos of different paths. Some were nice, with the sun filtering through the leaves, but despite my efforts to make this background work with the scene, the composition wasn't so good, and all the results were rather disappointing. So in a desperate attempt at creating something, I brought my camera at work, and took advantage of my lunch break to quickly reach Berton Street in Paris and photograph it. The street is actually quite narrow, paved, and has nice lamps, so it looked like a nice background possibility. However, it was a cloudy day, with a very flat and diffused light: in order to add visual interested I converted the scene to that foggy night look. This permitted me to turn the street lamps on in post-processing, resulting in a much more dramatic lighting of the characters. I believe this is the first time the main light of my background photo is virtual: it was interesting to achieve.

While I was processing the background, my wife was working on the pets. She created the eyes out of cardboard pieces, and glued them to the rocks. The rocks themselves were originally relatively flat, so I deformed the texture in post, to emulate their roundness. We also decided to dress in a way that would match the mood of this old Paris street, like in an old novel. I took the photos at home, using a lighting setup designed to match the virtual lighting of the street. I inserted all the characters in the scene, and created the various necessary shadows (woman on street, man on street, rocks on street, leashes on street, leash and collars on pets). Finally, I gave one of my cats an opportunity to make a little cameo appearance on the roofs :-)

Faith

nobody@flickr.com (Christophe Kiciak) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:54:57 -0700

Christophe Kiciak posted a photo:

This time, I decided to create an entry on the 'post-apocalyptic' theme. As usual, everything photographed and processed by me.

First, I had to find an idea: a dark mood was an obvious choice, but how add some interest to it? What kind of story to illustrate the destroyed environment? After some thinking, I decided to go with that man, lost in this new world, not really knowing what to do or not, what to believe or not. A man all by himself.

Then I needed an old ruined church. I created it using 3 actual churches:
1) Church of St. Ouen, Rouen
2) Cathedral of Rouen
3) Jumieges Abbey

I created a composite of 1) and 2), as none of them were fitting natively in my final frame. It was an amazing experience: the churches were matching incredibly well. It is quite obvious that their architects followed similar rules and plans. In fact, that similarity help me greatly, and even perhaps permitted me to finish the project within the week. Don't get me wrong, there was still some work to do (cloning out the altar, the visitors, adjusting the colors and lighting, etc.) but the main geometrical lines were just magically matching.

Then, I of course needed to 'destroy' it. For that, I used the photos of 3), which is actually a ruined abbey. I photographed many broken walls, windows, arks, roofs, and inserted them everywhere in my main image.

At this stage, I had all the photos I needed for the main building, but the ground was much too clean. Where to find a ground full of debris? I found the answer in an old abandoned hospital, located an hour away from where I live: the Sanatorium of Aincourt. The Internet is an incredible tool to find shooting locations I must say. The hospital was in use until WW2, unfortunately also used as internment camp during that war. It was quite unbelievable to penetrate in there. Everything was destroyed, graffiti on each wall, windows all broken... and yet one was able to recognize the rooms, their functions, and imagine all the things that happened. My wife and I were walking all alone, silently, visiting the different floors: it was very impressive, and sad at the same time. What you see is the actual content of various rooms and corridors ground.

In fact, all the churches and debris photos were taken the same day, that my wife and I spent on the road (first Aincourt sanatorium, then Rouen for the 2 churches, then Jumieges for the abbey). Intense, but rewarding, and we were lucky with the weather. Good that we had our roadmap ready, or we would never had the time to photograph everything.

Finally I shot a photo of myself at home using the appropriate lighting (and wearing some very old clothes way too big for me), and processed everything together, which took about 20 hours. The light beams converge to (quite logically) one point, relatively close to the church, symbolizing a reachable hope.

Thanks a lot for watching, hope you like it!