Clay Cook | Blog

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MASQUERADE, WHAT?

Romeo and Juliet meets Man In The Iron Mask meets Cape Fear. That’s what was going through my head, how could I represent this as a story in still photography? I knew we had the models for it and I knew the location was perfect for it. What about the light? Shouldn’t this be a very dark theme? Well, after some experimentation and mostly a lot of post production work, my vision came to life, with better then expected results. It all started with a Facebook post about getting together with 4 other AMAZING photographers and a handful of models, hitting Ancourage Park on a Sunday and just shoot. When I heard about this, I knew I had to take advantage of this situation and tell a story. With it being Halloween and all I thought a creepy, stalker theme would be appropriate and the male model John Wells was just perfect for it. I had one shot in mind and in my head, that was it, the rest came out of location inspiration and the help of friend/photographer Joey Goldsmith(goldsmithphoto.com). The week before the shoot I went out and bought some masquerade masks for about $30 bucks at a Halloween store. In the end they worked perfectly, they were subtle and not distracting. The focus has to be on the expressions of the model. I carried around my 3 speedlights and camera around the park from around 5pm to 10pm, shooting everything I could, fortunately I was lucky enough to have several models at hand everywhere I went. I think a couple of them really didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I sort of liked that, kept it interesting. I left the shoot happy and ready to get the results into Lightroom. Once everything was edited and I was happy, all I needed was a name. Out of the blue it came to me; “The Midnight Masquerade”. I think it fit the theme perfectly. I conjured up a logo, exported the files and uploaded. So far the response has been awesome and greatly inspired my next portrait series, which I hope to step it up even more. Thanks again to everyone that was involved that day and provided thier amazing talents. Such an inspiration.