Have you ever dreamt of walking in the middle of a damp dark alley late at night, carrying a bunch of balloons and not knowing why? Have you ever found yourself surrounded by nothing but an intoxicating, purple-dressed mystery? Have you perhaps ever envisioned a world where things felt and looked a bit more dreamy, aesthetic, and cinematic? Have you ever had that feeling of not being in the driver’s seat, that your life is somewhat scripted, simulated, and that your free will is but an elusive illusion?
The oneiric world has always served as an inspiration to artists and creators since time immemorial, all over the world, and so it did to this creative portrait-photography project. Fully executed at our Galacpic Studio in southwest Montreal, the series comprises a number of instants that seek to convey the ineffable attraction of the surreal and the familiar mysteriousness of the oneiric, with sensible use of color, light, negative space, and location.
For the technically curious, the full lighting setup consisted of 3 gel-colored lights mounted on a beauty dish as key light placed above the subject’s head and tilted 45 degrees down and two middle-sized soft-box modifiers for the colored rim lights on the sides. The camera body used was a Fujifilm X-T3, and the Fujinon 56mm F1.2 was the lens of choice for most of the pictures. The whole shoot was done tethered to Capture 1, which greatly helped simplify the capture and review process.
In regards to the postproduction, the environment is full CGI, created and rendered in-house and then composited along with the raw plates using industry-standard compositing and image editing tools.
