Week 04 – The NeverEnding Story

 
Let me start off by showing my lame-ness and saying that I have not yet seen The NeverEnding Story…

I have heard many great things about it. I may have seen random parts of the movie years ago. I do plan on watching it very soon, and I’m even more inspired to enjoy it after this week.

There’s that. On to the photo…

My main goal for this was to go for a ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ (which I have seen) vibe of me riding my grandmother’s dog Myaki. See the following sketch…

 
And for you lighting nerds…

Large Umbrella up front slightly off to camera right, a speedlight behind off to camera left, and I think I was entirely shaded by the tree line above, so only minor soft ambient light.

First off, it’s very hard to get an animal to do what you want. Especially untrained animals… It took awhile for me to get a shot of Myaki that I thought was suitable enough to use, and then I had to shoot myself based on the photo I chose.

All this time, my grandma Lucy was staring out of the kitchen window laughing and wondering what the heck I was doing.

After finishing the composite of us riding through the backyard, I realized how ridiculous we both looked with our goofy smiling faces – I literally snapped Myaki running across the backyard with the wind in his face, and I just wanted to look like I was having fun.

The goofiness of the expressions wasn’t matching the backyard setting for me, so I searched through old photos and came across this shot I took from the window seat while flying back from Colombia, and it just pushed it to the next level of ridiculous. So much, in fact, that it reminded me of the young boy Bastian riding Falcor, and I went with it.

 
Now all that’s left is to watch the movie.

-Rob Rice