Shadows On the Wall

After taking the kids' pictures in front of a wall and capturing their shadows, I started thinking about ways to make shadows that look like something out of a dream, or maybe even something that looks like a still from a movie.

Most of the ideas I came up with would involve making costumes and building props and going to a lot of time and expense to get the right shot. I'm not opposed to going to a lot of work to get the right shot, but I also don't have all the time in the world and I am no expert at trying to photograph shadows. I discovered when I was taking pictures of Rose and Emily that it is tricky to capture the shadows in a way that really makes them stand out. Doing that on a smaller scale might make the learning curve easier.

So with that in mind I decided to create shadows on a smaller scale by cutting out shapes from black card stock. Since Halloween is approaching, it seemed fitting to do something based on a scary movie and since shadows tend to be utilized a lot in horror movies it wasn't hard to find some good examples.

I settled on an iconic scene from "Nosferatu", a silent film from 1922 and the very first vampire movie. It was a super creepy movie surrounded by controversy and at one point a judge ordered all copies of the movie destroyed. And just like the plot to a scary movie, only one copy managed to escape destruction and it has been duplicated and distributed for audiences to watch for many years.

This is the scene from that film that I decided to recreate:

I traced the outline of his shadow and transferred the line drawing onto black card stock. Using an X-acto knife, I carefully cut out the shape of Orlok and the railing to the stairway. Cynthia helped me set them up on an old changing table that we still have in the basement and using a utility light and a piece of foam board for the background, we had a set built!

I couldn't use a professional studio strobe for this because the reflectors inside the light housing create diffused shadows (which is exactly what they are supposed to do), so I had to take an old utility light and modify it to produce a crisp, clear shadow. I'm still going to modify it some more, but for now this will work.

Here's the result:

It looked stark and creepy, but I thought if I added some wallpaper to the background it might add to the realism. I printed off an image of wallpaper that I found online and taped it to the foam board:

Now that's more like it! The wallpaper gave it some more texture and made it look like he is sneaking around in someone's house. The red coloring in this was produced by Cynthia holding up a transparent red storage bin lid in front of the utility light. The wallpaper was actually a weird greenish-gray color, so this was an improvement.

Here's my setup:

A closer look:

Cynthia also came up with the idea of using the clip to hold up the cutout. I used one of her old VHS tapes to make the shadow of the doorway.

It took a lot of tinkering to get the lighting just right and to make the shadow strong enough without placing the cutout so close that it would be in the shot. It was a cool experiment and now I want to try a few more!