Happy New Year, Yer Goin' to The Moon!

I did this image for a calendar (month of January) sponsored by the art community website RedBubble, the proceeds of the sales of which went to the Fred Hollows Foundation charity for the prevention of blindness.

The MO for the 12 photographers taking part was to make a picture involving yourself wearing a minimum of clothing. I might have taken that a bit too literally…

I’m leaving its original posted description here because it is one of the most intricate collages I’ve ever done, and of course I couldn’t bear not divulging how it was constructed…

Happy New Year… Yer Goin’ to the Moon!

OK guys, here`s my take on the mad month of January… and what better way of calling in the new year than getting naked and sending your cat to the moon? Just shows what kind of dark mischief some of us can get up to when there`s nobody around to keep us out of trouble!

This is a collage made up of 6 separate shots…

I first shot the background scene with the open window, balancing studio flash with the natural light from the kitchen. I figured if anything went wrong, I`d still have an untouched basic shot to fall back on.

I then shut the window, pulled the blind (hey, the neighbors talk!) and ran off a bunch of selfies with the self timer in different poses. I held the rocket in all of these as I knew it had to be pointed out the window and it would have been hard to get my hand in the right position without actually holding it. The part of the string hanging straight down was part of this take.

Next I took a piece of firework fuse (blew me away you could actually buy that by the meter in Brussels!), held it with hot dog tongs over some aluminum foil to save the carpet, and lit it when the self timer counted to zero. The fuse burned really fast so I set the exposure different on 4 takes to make sure I got it right… used 1/60 sec in the end.

The cat was next… and Scratch tried to run away so I knew he`d be great! I held him just above the floor, and as the self timer approached zero, I dropped him…. 8 times! Got some amazing expressions that way, this was the best as he looked back at me saying “you`ve done some crazy shit, but now you`ve just gone f`ing MAD!”

Not really knowing how I was going to “tie” him to the rocket, I made some string shots, having used a marker I`d put on the floor during the original shots of me holding the rocket. Here I used one that I ran upwards with a bow knot that I stuck onto my black camera bag at the height I figured Scratch`s neck would be so it would look as if tied to his collar.

Lastly, the fireworks out the window were taken several years ago during a firework display in the Algarve, Portugal. I did a bit of layer blending so the view through the glass of the closed window frame would maintain a bit of its original reflection.

The difficult stuff being done, it was a blast putting everything together in Photoshop… although there were some tedious bits. “cutting out” the spikes in my hair and the sparks of the burning fuse to blend in with the background was a pain, as was changing the wording on the helium balloon from Happy Birthday to Happy New Year (why can`t you get New Year balloons in May??). I also made sure the light direction was consistent in all the elements and added shadows where necessary. Only other processing was adjusting brightness levels and cloning out some of the dead spiders in the corner behind the radiator. Oh, and I changed the color of the walls and painted the radiator which is actually off-white.

All elements except fireworks were shot with a Canon EOS 5D MkI + EF 28-80 USM. All processing done in CS3.