Holy fucking butts batman! I really do not check this site as much as I should. I mean, I own it. It’s not like Instagram where you rent space and pay the social media gods to display your work. This is my home. I really should start treating it like my home. People should want to come here over some stupid ass social media site. You can at least look at images in “high resolution” and take time understanding my methods(laughs).

I really wish this population had the attention span to visit a website for more than 5 minutes. I really feel like I shouldn’t market the Instagram crowd as they see no purpose in lingering with art. They all aren’t bad. I think the people that follow me are actually kinda intelligent and when it comes to art, they care just a wee bit more. Hello people that actually click on my website in hopes that it might be updated with new content. I did do some updating this evening. Nothing major, just added some shoots through the different tabs. So enjoy some “fresh” images if you are looking around.

But yeah, I suppose I should share something. Let you into my mind. Understand my process, blah blah blah blah blah. You can see how seriously I am taking this. Well, maybe if I start talking about something I will feel the urgency to actually be genuine.

A couple months ago, November to be exact, I was in North Carolina. This usually means working with one of my favorite friends, @mycelial.muse for your consideration, if you want to follow her on social media.

She’s just great. You’ll see her face and body everywhere on this website. Anywho, I seem to have some strange affliction with old farm houses lately. The month before I rented a gorgeous 200 year old farm house in New York state to photograph my friend Helena(another lengthy blog post in the making). I just so happen to had found another farm house in bum fuck North Carolina. This one was literally nowhere near anything. There is a lot of nothing in North Carolina. I’m not sorry. It can be crap. I’m always apprehensive about these places because my stereotype prejudice of country folk kicks in. Yes, your rednecks, your trumpers, your inbred, your backwater banjo playing plebeians. Have I offended you yet? Well, they offend me, so bugger off. The minute I open my mouth they write me off as some liberal fuctard Yankee. They are correct!

Anyway, yes, I rented a civil war era farm house in the boonies of North Carolina with my pal Mycelial Muse

It was a beautiful parcel of land. It was a gorgeous day. There were a plethora of civil war confederate jokes to be made. We met the owner, who was very gracious, and that destroyed all my awful stereotypical thoughts of country people. No it didn’t but he was nice to our face. Gave us a tour and I slowly started seeing a a trend. He was the great great great grandson of a Confederate soldier. He could not be prouder of that lineage. Literally showed us the saddle his great great great great grandpappy road on. The house was filled will nuanced reminders the south would indeed, rise again. We bit our tongues. Or I should say I did. I’m a rather verbose, wears emotions on his sleeve, can only take soo much rush limbaugh and anne Coulter kinda guy.

Ack, anyway, I don’t want to drag politics into this. I do but I’ve probably already lost half of you. It was a very interesting home. Rebuilt and built over the generations. Fully updated in the 80s. It was the perfect place to photograph anyone. Oh and most of the work we did there was nude work. Yeah…he will never know what photos were made on his premises. We shot in many locations, outside, the barn, the wood stacks, in almost every room. Gorgeous material that I am still going through because, god, how can you even begin to edit such a wealth of images? The house has a civil war feel for it, with period furniture, paintings and artifacts. We were given free reign so after a good afternoon of photographing we decided to change it up a little.

I’ve forgotten to mention an extra piece in this puzzle. Our mutual friend, stylist, makeup artist, creative wonder, model of a person, Naomi decided to join us after one of her wedding gigs. Naomi is a consortium of talent. She does everything, very well I might add. What her true love though, is all things horror related. Anything macabre, morose, devilish, strange, bizarre is her wheel house. We had chatted briefly weeks before about doing something up that alley. Follow her @hairartbynaomi. So when this house fell into our laps, we immediately thought it could be used for the hellish. Together we conjured up an idea that had a part exorcist, part the ring, part poltergeist all mixed into one. Naomi would play the apparition and Mycelial Muse would be the poor plagued soul.

Time to wake up some confederate ghosts!

Now, I had a textbook feeling on how I wanted this to look. Sort of like an early 80’s horror movie. A little dirty/grimey, noisy and orange? My brain works in mysterious ways. I don’t even really know how to light for “movies” so I just wing it most of the time. I generally used one or two strobes off camera for most of these shots. Sometimes I had a snoot, the other times I had a small umbrella. I wanted a real feeling of separation from the subjects and their scene so they are the ones that are mostly lit in them, with just hints of the scene that I lifted the shadows in post. I currently use a Godox ad600 explor if you are interested in the gear and a canon eos R for most of the shots. I mainly used a 14mm Irix f2.4 ultra wide angle prime. Why? Distortion. When you go that wide, everything just feels distorted, uneasy, wrong.

In the first couple images you’ll see us in a living room sort of area. If you look at the window it’s a deep red. Color myself so lucky because that was not added. The flood lights outside the house were a deep tungsten orange and created their own hell on earth look. I take no credit for that.

Most of these shots are second curtain sync. Meaning, the flash does not happen at the beginning of the exposure but when the shutter is about to close. This is only meaningful if you have a shutter speed that is slow enough to capture this. Why would you do this Mike? Simple, freezing movement but also showing that movement. As you’ll see, Naomi is an apparition. A specter. She dawned a long black wig, painted her body and created these engrossing nails that scared the crap out of me. She also used false teeth to up the fear. I always wanted her to begin as a faint, almost blurry apparition to Mycelial Muse. Slowly she would emerge and then take a more unified form as we moved throughout the house. Mycelial Muse’s wardrobe was on point, an Edwardian or Victorian(sorry I don’t know my eras) vintage wedding dress. It played the part perfectly. She perfectly acted the anguish we were looking for. She really looks tortured in a lot of these.

To make us pee our pants even more, I supplied a subtle soundtrack of music to help us. Christ, Spotify has some scary ass shit on there. I was more interested in quiet piano, atmospheric sounds and distorted noises. They all delivered. As with most things in my brain, there wasn’t a set script. We just moved from area to area, about 4 scenes in total. I just wanted to keep the mood going and shoot.

This was a learning experience for myself as I never shoot or do things like this. Straight horror? Not my usual thing though it fascinates me to attempt things I normally do not do. Only grow when you’re uncomfortable right?

What would I do differently now that I’ve done this? Hmmmm be more mindful of some strobe placement. Always, always use a tripod. Get a wider range of looks? I tend to get hooked on a certain pose and take too many images.

What did I fail at? Levitation. Gosh it was bad. The photos got axed but levitation is a simple camera parlor trick where you take two exposures. In the first exposure you have your subject sitting on something or laying. The second exposure is just of the scene, with no subject. You combine them in PS and erase what the subject is sitting or laying on and they look like they are floating. In a lot of situations it’s very easy to do but when heavy shadows are involved and intricate patterns I tend to fail at. We were able to do some mock levitation as Mycelial Muse was laying on a bench on the bed and her long dress covered the bench so it worked out in the end but boy did I fail. Like I said, those photos got deleted quick.

Anyway, enjoy these photos, I’ve also included some behind the scenes stuff because apparently people get all hot and bothered by those things. Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll do my best to make something up.

Getting prepped for possession. Wine glass where it should be?

No Kaylee, not that kind of shoot. — No Mycelial Muse, not that kind of shoot.

This gal went from an all day wedding to coating herself in paint for this.

A quick test of the the lights. As you can see I used a 28 beauty deep parabolic umbrella. Say that five times fast. Look at that eerie light coming in through the window.

A personal fave. Though not without me knit picking. I would have had Naomi about 6 inches further back so I could only see her arm.

A close second with personal faves. Even though Naomi was killing it with facial expressions, the absence of face here is scarier to me.

I forgot to mention the strobes were gelled here.

You made it this far? THANK YOU! WOW I OWE YOU A BEER. Thank you really, I appreciate you looking. I don’t speak too much about my insight into my own shoots because I generally think my ideas are rather simple. I don’t have grand schemes. I just have thoughts strung together. Let me know through text, email, comments if you’d like to see more of these breakdowns. Till next time!

Mike