Pointed

My plan for pointed was originally to have a close-up shot of a needle being pulled through some material. The actual shot I used actually came about pretty much on the spur of the moment. 

We had just finished shooting the high/low shots and I was talking about the shots that I had left to do and about an idea I’d had for blunt, but that it didn’t really suit my pointed contrast as it was quite violent. So I came up with something a little more sinister which was for Gina to hold a knife to Steves throat. 

Steve was fairly apprehensive about it (though I can’t imagine why), but we eventually talked him into it. 

I wanted to have the shot almost in silhouette as I wanted to leave details to the imagination. However, I did want some light on Gina’s face to give her a more sinister appearance. I positioned the two of them in front of a wall lamp so that they were back-lit. I then positioned an off camera flash on the floor beside Steve aiming up into Gina. 

We shot various angles of the knife, but the one I liked best was this which framed Gina’s face between her arm, the knife and Steve’s chest. Her face sort of pokes out in a way that’s a little reminiscent of Jack Nicholson coming through the door in ‘The Shining’. 

This was actually fairly simple to shoot, and for once I wasn’t complaining about light as I was intentionally going for a very dark and shadowy image, and the final shot is very close to what I had in mind.

Blunt

For this I wanted to take a menacing picture of someone wielding a blunt instrument. I want an imposing figure staring down into the camera. 

For the shot to work I wanted to use a rather poor quality fisheye lens that I picked up from eBay some time ago. As it is so low quality it distorts the frame and giving shots a surreal look. 

To get the shot I lay on the ground, and had Glenn swing at me with hammer. Of course the close he got to the lens, the more distorted it would look. 

I took various shots, some with me in frame, others without. 

In the end I chose my final shot based on the motion blur of the hammer head, and the way that the arm drags the eye to it. 

As with the pointed shot this was another that came out close to my imagination.