Decayby *MachinesBleedToo

Community Projects / Projects / My Personal Nightmare

Eugh, this freaks me out. I like looking at it but at the same time it makes me feel kinda nauseous. Which is good, I guess.

I have this horrid fear of losing my eyesight or having my eyes gauged out. As for the rest of it...uhh, I love dead things. It's an edit from the night I went to a movie night dressed as a zombie.

This was pushing on photo manip but nothing aside from colour is edited so I think it's classed as norm photography. I'm never sure, I'm a total newbie to all of this.

I love how sickly and slimy my skin looks though. I wanted to make it look like a horror film where people are like crawling around in the dark with torches and BAM zombie/corpse comes outta nowhere.

Second entry for My Personal Nightmare.

Third will come soon I hope!

Model, photo, makeup and edits = me.
All the blood and wounds on my face are:
+fake blood I made from glucose syrup
+black purple and yellow eyeshadow
+eyelash glue
+red lip gloss.

The edits to the photo are:
+messed with colours- made them less vibrant, and added more blue to them
+darkened eyes and edges
+lightened lips to make them more...well, dead. Haha.

Crit me please! I'm learning.

EDIT: Added a slight blur around everything 'cept my face- I love the focus on it now, and it looks even more nauseating. Bwahaha.

I don't like what my computer's LCD does to it- the tones are more blue on my laptop and it's also a lot lighter. Sigh technology. Sigh.

Critique by `RockstarVanity Aug 29, 2009, 8:08:56 AM

Before I say anything else (and so I don't forget to mention it at the end), this absolutely qualifies as photography in my opinion. I understand how blurry the lines between 'regular' photography, digital darkroom adjustments and photomanipulation can seem, especially when you don't often venture into these galleries too often.

Photomanipulation, for the purpose of dA, generally involves the combination of two or more images. Digital darkroom is generally when the images has undergone changes that mimic those carried out in a darkroom and go beyond 'normal' photography, like the addition of textures and brushes or other heavy editing. The 'regular' photography galleries are home to images when have undergone no editing or not much editing. Slight alterations to colours, contrast, levels etc are perfectly acceptable.

Yay! I'm so glad that you've been inspired to shoot photos, especially since they're for the My Personal Nightmare challenge. Conceptually, I can relate to this a lot. I'm terrified of anything going wrong with my sight. I already need glasses and my eyes seem to be getting continually worse. It scares the crap out of me.

There's something quite challenging about having someone else wrap your own fears up in an image. On a deeper level than simply having a fear of losing your eyes, this picture speaks of a feeling that the loss of vision would be like the first steps of death, whether artistically or literally. It gives me chills.

I really like what you've done with the make-up. There's enough going on in terms of injuries to look convincing and disturbing, but not so much that it becomes gratuitous or takes away from the meaning of the image - loss of eyes.

As for composition, there's a symmetry-obsessed part of me that wants to swivel this about 5 degrees clockwise and then re-crop it so that the line of nose, cupid's bow and chin is perfectly vertical and central in the frame. But the fact that the subject isn't completely face-on makes the slight asymmetry work just as well.

I like the colours...all grimy and wonderfully corpse-like. The lighting is perfect too, all satisfyingly dark around the edges with the face appearing to be lit by a flash-light in a dark creepy room. It looks like a nightmare (in the best possible way) and feels rough and authentic enough to be genuinely chilling to look at.

What do you think?

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