Summon

Welcome to week six called Summon. I named this photoshoot this because I thought that it fit pretty well. When I was organizing these odd objects, it felt like I was trying to summon something. My goal was to make a mandala out of strange things and it came together like something out of American Horror Story. But I am satisfied with its weirdness and hope you enjoy!

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Kaila Hicks, Summon, 2021

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THE SET-UP

Here is how I set up this photo session. I didn’t have a long enough table to place the poster board and objects on top of so I had to place them on the floor. As you can see I adjusted my studio lights as low as I could get them. The lights don’t allow me to angle them downwards so I improvised and placed something underneath the back legs of both lights to get that angle. This allowed the objects to become fully lit. 

The creepy clown heads and roses were found in my basement. The red-painted babies I already had for a Halloween photoshoot I did last year. And then the red button I have had for a long time with my crafting collections. I already had the idea that I wanted this photoshoot to consist of red items. I found the clown heads and roses and created a pattern that worked really well and so I added the red babies and button to finish it off. 

Here is an action shot of me taking the pictures. I couldn’t use my tripod because it didn’t angle down far enough so I had to manually hold the camera over the objects. It was a little difficult because I needed to get my camera evenly over the objects. I made sure to take several pictures so that I could at least get one image that was evenly head on. 

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EDITING

This is a before and after of Summon. This was a pretty easy image to edit, I didn’t really have to do too much to it. I cropped the image down to a 1x1 square. And then boosted the exposure and shadows up.

I also painted over the right, left and bottom clown head to adjust their brightness. If you look at the before image you can tell they were more of an off-white. They were probably older than the top clown head. But after I did that, the image was all done — easy peasy!

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Kaila Hicks, Summon before and after, 2021

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SUMMARY

Brainstorming this photoshoot, I just knew I wanted to do a red theme. I like the vibrancy of the color red and so I went on a search for red things in my house. When searching my basement and finding the clown heads with hints of red on them, it was perfect. I found more red things and put it all together.

If you couldn’t tell already, I like things out of the ordinary. I’ve always been a goofy person, so I am always drawn to create avant-garde photos. This is a great example of that. But I hope to keep finding odd things and that my photographs just get weirder and weirder — check back next week!