One more day until Halloween, and you can now officially strike mini golf off of my list of activities I’d consider doing tomorrow thanks to a slightly disturbing collaboration between photographer Leo Rosas Morin and retouching artist Michael Ramhardter.
This year, the two friends decided to get together for a Halloween-themed shoot that combined three things they love: golf, horror, and photography.
What they came up with was a photo shoot featuring the character Jason Voorhees from the iconic Friday the 13th movies, a mild-mannered if a bit stupid (Who mini golfs on a creepy Friday the 13th alone!!?? He was asking for it…) golfer, and a bit of fake blood.
The result was a sequence of images that tells the rather grim tale of how the golfer, played by Johannes Kendler, met his untimely end at the hands of Jason, played by Wolfgang Pöllmann:
Poor, poor mini golfer… He never saw that hockey masked mass murderer coming.
We spoke to Leo to see if he could offer some details about how these images came to be. Here’s what he had to say:
For the close portrait of the Golf Player, I used a Elinchrom Quadra with standard reflector placed from camera right for a big contrast (45 degrees angle to get that nice “Rembrandt triangle”) and for Jason with umbrella and from above for drama and softer light quality.
A Nikon SB 900 speedlight was used from the back to create an edge light, which would complement the mood and the other images of the background later on in post.
For the playing scene where Jason approaches the golf player, I decided to add a little light painting effect by using the continuous light from the Elinchrom Quadra and triggering the flash on rear curtain to freeze the subjects.
Then the speed-lights where quickly placed in different positions to add some information on the trees and on the mini golf court… sometimes even on the ground in a very rough way to just obtain that bit of information that would help us when working with the images in post.
It was a tricky shoot: not much light and a really cold night, the models (friends of ours) were rockstars and did their best under the cold weather :).
All this was possible thanks to the team work with Michael Ramhardter, who is a great friend of mine and we both planned the shoot from the beginning, so we both were 100% aware of what was needed. This helped us complete the shoot in just a couple of hours during a spooky night, and bring Jason Voorhees to life once again 🙂
Leo was even kind enough to share the untouched RAW files so we could put together some before and after comparisons. Scroll down to check those out:
Like I said… no more mini golfing for me. Thanks Leo…
In all seriousness, a big thank you to Leo for sending us this photo shoot and sharing so many of the details behind it. If nothing else, it’s a great example of a collaboration between talented friends that just wanted to do something together this Halloween.
To see more from either of these talented folks, check out Leo or Michael on 500px by clicking here and here, respectively.
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