A BTS post can ruin an illusion of an image to the point where a viewers first impression or perspective is totally destroyed. In the past I personally have learned so much from seeing the “how it is done”, that it has become very important to me that I try and share as much knowledge as possible (time permitting), in hopes that it can help even one person.

A lot of the time I have a title for an image right away but in this case I had the image of a human eye in a pool of ocular fluid long before the title popped into my head. When developing an image in my mind I try and break it down to the simplest of forms before committing to shooting it. It is important that I am able to pull it off cheaply, within my abilities and within the time allowed. I struggled for a long time trying to figure out how I was going to photograph a realistic human eye and until I was sure I could pull it off, it was only one of my fantastical ideas that normally get trashed.

I played with the idea of using a real cow eye but this idea so totally grossed out my wife that I was ready to not do it. Then I thought that maybe if I used two ends of a boiled egg it would have enough shape and sheen to work as a perfect place holder for the minimal Photoshop work I had hoped for.

As you can see I also used cherry licorice pull apart candy for the optic nerve. The candy was used for the main eye and all the eyes in the jar as well.

The secondary prop eyeballs for the jar were created by rolling air dry modeling clay into eyeball sized spheres, baking them in the oven at 170 degrees C for 3 hours, then painting an iris and pupil with latex paint. Finally some veins were drawn on with a red sharpie and the licorice optic nerves were glued into a pre-made hole. The water in the jar was tinted with a very small amount of green food coloring. The cloudiness of the water was due to the instant nature of the clay starting to disintegrate when immersed in water.

Here is my favorite backdrop for old creepy, dusty and texture filled photography. This wall is located in the basement of an old building in the town where I live, the building is over 100 years old. The table is a small square hand made table that has a plywood top. Like the wall it has a wonderful texture from being exposed to the elements for so long.

I ended up actually using 4 strobes (flashes) and one reflector in this shot.

A setup shot using one of the clay eyeballs as a proxy before placing the egg eyeball and covering it with a pool of ocular fluid (egg white).

Once everything was placed and the clay eyeballs placed into the green water, I had to work quickly because the clay eyeballs started to disintegrate very fast.

Once the main frame was shot the next step was to make the egg eyeball look like a human eyeball and to reduce the fake look of the clay eyeballs in the jar.

I took a shot of a real human eye with only one light and a reflector.

The merging of the human eye and veins was very simple using a combination of overlay layers and standard layers to keep the same shadow tones from the egg but yet give the iris the original look. The last step in the whole process was selective dodging and burning to make sure the jar of eyes looked less fake and more subtle in the background. The red brick wall was desaturated to bring more attention to the main subject.

Once I was happy with the look of the jar and brick wall I then realized that the words on the glass jar could be read in a bad way so I also made sure that the words were very subtle vs. easy to read. Lastly some shadow highlight filter was performed on the puddle of fluid to enhance the texture of the table top.

Final version titled, “Midnight Snack”

Thanks for reading this far. If you have any questions I would be glad to elaborate.