Chances are, you have already seen some taste of my interest in the macabre.  This photograph goes right along with it, a little disturbing and also surreal.  I have always wondered about the woman in this photograph, the character she is portraying.  Is she hiding from someone and chose an uncomfortable place?  Or is the set of tools in silhouette a portent of things to come?

We were shooting all kinds of crazy stuff at my house this particular day.  This model is a friend of mine, Gina, and she makes the best desperation/misery faces I've ever shot and that's precisely what I was going for here.  She had asked what sorts of clothes to bring to the shoot and I told her knee socks were always welcome.  They make such an interesting contrast against whatever creepy background I've decided on that day (or will decide on once I see the socks).

This was before I started shooting with a strobe light and so the image is a little bit orange, but I like that.  It shows off the aqua and blue very nicely.

This is actually me under the lawnmower.  So /technically/ I didn't take the picture, but I did everything including setting the camera and just had my friend walk around me with the tripod, set it down and take a #photograph.  Walk around, move the tripod, push the shutter.

Incidentally, the human head won't fit underneath a lawnmower comfortably, as is evident by our unfortunate guy here.  I removed the blade and unplugged the spark plug when setting this shot up, and still the bell of the mower was too low and trying to break my nose.  So I dug a hole, tossed a plastic bag down in it and lay down.  Still not enough room.

I dug a strip out of the earth next to the hole so my neck would recess.  My head was lower still and yet, the lawnmower was starting to sit on my neck instead of my nose and that wasn't pleasant.  So I cut some wood and lifted the rear wheels of the mower about a half an inch which kept the thing from cutting off my #AirSupply completely.  (Yes, I did that so fans of Air Supply might accidentally come across this photograph without meaning to.  I like practical jokes.)

All in all, I was only able to be under it for about twenty minutes before I just couldn't handle the discomfort anymore and was done.  I tossed the dirt back in the hole and lay the sod back over the top and voila!  The hole is gone!

A lot of people ask me what that red stuff is.  My usual answer is "my face after the blade chewed me up really good" but occasionally I'm kind and tell people it was a mixture of red food coloring, tomato sauce, tomato paste, diced tomatoes (unsalted) and a tiny bit of post production work.

The Council of Eyes also known as the dead fish picture

The image below might be a little creepy for some tastes and that's all right.  I can't imagine someone reading my blog and not being at least a little bizarre, a little twisted, so to most I'm sure it's fine.  It is, for those of you who are curious, a bunch of dead fish staring up at the camera.  Go look if you are interested, I'll wait right here.

Okay, now that it's out of the way.  My thoughts on this #photograph.

It strikes me, every time I see it, the line of dead staring at me, in a way that human corpses can't.  A line of them in this manner would be too much for me to take in, I wouldn't be able to look.  I don't have the stomach for real gore and death even while much of my art deals with those themes.  But give me a mirror and Medusa's gaze becomes much less unpleasant.

I had gone with my friend Claire to Seafood City, an Asian market on Olive in University City.  I took my camera along, well because that's why we went, to see if there was something awesome to shoot.  There are long rows of very colorful packages, lots of symmetry and a ton of cartoonlike characters and bizarre things to shoot.  When we got to the fishmarket side of the grocer, I was enthralled.

I actually took a lot of pictures of the fish that day, many varieties and colors, shapes and sizes.  This is my favorite shot for a lot of reasons, not the least is the aforementioned awareness in the eyes.  But I like the patterns in the photograph.  I like the colors.  And I really like the textures.  The combination of contrast, color, and composition (the three big C's in graphic design) really brings me to a stop every time I see it.

Yes, I know it's a little weird and a little dark.  But then again, so am I.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Seafood City if you are in the St Louis area and looking for Asian ingredients for cooking.  As you can see they sell fresh fish (much of it actually live) but they also offer all sorts of noodles and spices and even cereal from over the Pacific at a very reasonable price.  I like it more than Jay's because it's much bigger and doesn't have all the hipsters clogging the aisles.