Nightshade Ride

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Nightshade Ride

“I sent a car to pick you up at school. I thought you might like a lift. I didn't expect a declaration of war.”

A nightshade ride

Rain, dusk, puffy smoke coming out of some ground-level exhaust pipes. Street food stands selling slimy fried “chicken” and synthetic bear paws. More rain and echoed distant wind. Colored fog wrapping the brutality of the skyrise buildings, muzzled voices coming from beyond the darkness…
Piercing neon lights and sound waves punch through the pockets of mist. Sony, CaNikon, Atari, Macrosoft, you name it.

Available on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/quantized-romanticism

Happy 2021…

Dystopian flaneurs hang around downtown looking for the only game in town: a quick slomo trip, some unprobably updated blond droid girl and a gloomy hotel room. Or perhaps an underpass conclave where a few pre-reset tough ladies can still be found at night. Quantized romanticism, stuff can still happen…

I must have arrived in this funny place too early, there was barely anyone around. Since they seized all watches some time ago, I hardly know what hour, week or year is anymore… 2043, 2050, 2038, your guess is as good as mine. I then wandered and dazed off for a while until I saw her and her hypnotic gaze, luring me into the shadows of this underground passage..

good versus good

The painterly depiction above could serve as aesthetic basis for 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 cyberpunk decadence, with sensible use of color, fashion, make-up, light, and negative space.

For the technically curious, the full lighting setup consisted of 4 Godox speedlights mounted on a beauty dish as key light placed above the subject’s head and tilted 45 degrees down, two parabolic modifiers for the colored rim lights plus one extra umbrella to fill from close to floor level. The camera body used was a Fujifilm X-T3, and the Fujinon 90mm F2 was the lens of choice for most of the pictures. The whole shoot was done tethered to Capture 1 via a USB-C cable, 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. Truly a blend of the timeless art of capturing photons on a camera obscura, along with really the latest, state-of-the-art digital techniques.