Digital Photography

Why this picture? I think it's creepy and very cool. I absolutely love it. Again, it's a picture that I'd like to put up on my wall because there is so much to look at. I could stare at this picture for hours just trying to figure out how he captured it. Did he have two models? Must have because there is a girl in the back left side of the picture and then a hand coming out of nowhere on the right side of the picture. I wonder if Laughlin had this picture all planned out in his mind and if it came out just the way he pictured it when he thought it up...

What's going on in this picture? Well, he framed the shot very well. I think he framed it this way on purpose to sort of point the eye in a specific direction.....like the repeating doorways....if you look closely at the center of the picture through the open doorways, you see a real house, one that is not burned down...this makes the shot even more creepy. It's almost like the living being in the burnt house is the ghost of it....maybe a girl that lived there before it burned down....maybe she was burned in the house and has since refused to leave it as a ghost....or better yet, maybe she's forced to wander the house because of an unsolved mystery regarding the house fire and her death and maybe the death of her family too....maybe they all wander the house and it's haunted....ok, I'm daydreaming now but really, I think there's a good creepy movie that could come from this picture. :)

Really, the more and more I look at this shot the more and more I want to stare and the more and more I love it....

Okay, onto the technical side of things. How was the photograph made? Well, it looks like he set up a tripod and told the girl in the pic to pose, move, or whatever it is she's doing while he set up the camera and then stuck out his arm so that the picure included his hand reaching out when the picture took.....oh, but did they have timed cameras back then?? (1941??) I'm an idiot when it comes to that kind of thing.... anyway, even if he didn't have it timed, he could have used two models. The girl, and another person for the hand on the right. It looks like a man's hand.... There is a very deep depth of field on this picture....I'm almost sure that he did this on purpose so that the eye would be drawn to the back of the picture where the unburned house is peaking through. The little girl model looks like she was in motion when the shot was taken so I'm assuming that he used a fast film speed in order to capture the motion without blurriness. However, the girls' arm that is directly up in the air, her fingers on that hand look just a little blurry.

So, just this second I noticed something else....if you look at the girl then look slightly to the left of her, there are three shadows that look like huge fingers that are picking her up by the back of her shirt collar or something.....and she looks like she's being caught by surprise and she's fighting it....hmmm....

Check out more of Laughlin's photos at the Masters of Photography website here, and another post on one of his other photos here.