From the greek root “nuktos” comes a phobia that effects millions of adults and children throughout the world. Nyctophobia, or an extreme fear of the dark, can paralyze children and adults to the point of being immobile in darkness, even with in their own houses. What the exact fear is can be hard to pinpoint when the fear itself can’t be seen, possibly the fear of intruding burglars or of the paranormal.
With more than 40,000 species found on earth, people who suffer from extreme fear of spiders have a hard time avoiding these creepy crawlers. Arachnophobia is the phobia of spiders, and although more people die every year from bees and even dogs, this fear plagues many.
The fear of bats, chiroptophobia, has been overcome by one of the most famous superheroes of all time. Batman can be a beacon of hope for all with phobias as he turned his fear into source of power.
Behind the Lens
1) Nyctophobia: This photo took many attempts and tweaks to achieve. The ride light was achieved with a laser pointer moving back a forth many times (30 sec. exposure). The hands were achieved from 2 people hiding in the scene and the models own hands, the trick being that all the people had to have dark non-reflective clothing and hide all other exposed parts of skin. The main models has 2 layers of black clothing on to absorb the laser light, and a heavy black fabric background was placed behind the model to do the same. For some reason, one which I admittedly don’t understand, the laser only would show on exposed human skin in these conditions.
2) Arachnophobia: This photo took many attempts as well, the biggest struggle being getting the face of the model to be clear. With a speedlight flashing 10 times to capture the multiple arm effect, the face moved quite a bit. One photo in particular that did not turn out had a small area where multiple pupil reflections showed up (arm movement made the model’s position move). We ended up having the model keep her eyes closed until the last frame where the speedlight was flashed closer to her face to avoid the multiple eyes. This way her face, neck and clothing line would be somewhat blurred, but her eyes would be sharp.
3) Chiroptophobia: This photo features a model with a full batman costume on, and actually involves 5 others to achieve the lighting effect. The model stood as still as possible while assistant one (the photographer) drew the yellow bat wings with an iphone app that turned the whole screen into a lighted color patch. Once the wings were drawn, they moved to the front and lit the model’s face with a white iphone screen light (similar to the yellow) near the end on the 30 second exposure by turning the phone upward and lighting the chin, cheeks, and lighting the eyes from the side of the face. Using a speedlight was attempted to illuminate the subject, but at the lowest power the other assistants and background image came into the image, it was too light. The other 4 assistants had multiple green glow sticks that were moved around to create this dramatic green background.
Happy Lighting!
Kaiti Grant 