Photographing Fear

8. March 2010 by Friedhelm.

Creating images that bring out fear, joy sadness compassion etc. out of the viewer are always a great challenge. I wanted to create an image that creates feelings of fear. I borrowed this old Turkish knife and put my camera of a tripod. I set the camera on manual focus and pre-focused the distance. I used f13 to give a good depth of field, 0,5 sec. expose time to capture the motion @ ISO 400. I used two umbrellas with permanent lights to create the reflection on the knife. The I took the first test shots to get the right angle for the reflection of the light on the knife. It took a little bit of patients and a number of try shots to get this image. The trick was to overexpose a little bit, hold the knife still in the final position and move the knife backwards during the exposure time to get the reflection of the light into the camera. During the post-production process I duplicated the image and inverted the second layer. Then I “played” a little bit in Photoshop to get the desired effect.

Enjoy the image and start experimenting!

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