I have several favorite photos that I have done over the years. The monkeys lifting up the ladies dress and the man tapped by his wife to the wall both come to mind right off. I believe however this image more than any other is about me. I have struggled with colitis all my adult life and have sat in Doctors offices for years wondering why anyone would want to be a proctologist. I guess it does have a certain air about it. OK I have heard and told most of the jokes anyone could think of.
I remember sitting in a doctors office and thinking what if this place was decorated with the butts of animals rather than the heads. When I told the crew what we were to be doing they were a bit surprised. Yes we need 15 butts of animals to hang on the wall for this shoot. When the humor of the image finally struck everyone they were on board.
The calls went out looking for animal butts resulting in more than a few strange comments from prop houses and taxidermy shops. “No quite frankly Mr Morgan we do not have stuffed rear ends here” . It soon became obvious that we would have to get entire animals and pushed them through holes in the walls. People just do not have stuffed butts. If you looked on the back side of this image it was all the fronts of animals. It looked very weird. We should have taken a photo of the backside (NO pun intended) of the set but did not. The animals were stuffed and not real.
Lighting
This shot has 6 lights and one reflector.
1. Large overhead soft box giving the image a top back light.
2 Head with reflector over head in the nurses station on person. Thats my wife as the nurse.
3. second head overhead on background of nurses station.
4. 200 watt bulb in the lamp.
5. Grid on his face from over the wall camera right to imitate the lamp.
6. Umbrella behind the camera as a fill light.
7. There is a 4 X 8 foot piece of foam core on the floor reflecting light into the face of the patient.
Camera
I used a Sinar 4X5 view camera to shoot this shot. Shot at f 22 at one second. The one second was for the lamp.
The set
We used 2 simple walls in an L shape. The window was cut into the large wall as well as holes for all the animals. We cut mounting plaques, to go around the animals, out of plywood. The plaques were cut in half and place around the animals like a collar.
Well that is it for the Protogelist shot.
Have a great new year and keep shooting.
