A Midnight Carnival by Chris Raecker

http://www.chrisraecker.com/MC.html


If you follow the above link, you can view the gallery of A Midnight Carnival, a series of photographs by Chris Raecker. This series inspired one of my recent shoots. Chris Raecker uses photoshop on his images to create the soft silhouette on the subject. I also really like the extreme angle that most of his shots are taken. The third thing that his photographs needs to have is something going on in the sky. He never photographs on a clear day. 

My idea to emulate this style of images was to photograph at a park playground. I thought this was an interesting comparison  because for a little kid, a playground is kind of an amusement park. I created my silhouette by duplicating the image then applying a Gaussian blur and then using the multiply blend mode to blend it back in. I like how this looks a little fantasy like because the people in my photos are not children. The shadows almost makes it look like a dream like return to childhood on the playground. One thing I would do differently would be to shoot on a better day for the clouds. I feel like my photos lack some of the drama that is so interesting in "A Midnight Carnival" because I do not have as strong imagery in the sky.