Scary Exhibition

This piece was done for Digital Photography School weekly assignment. The title was "Movies" so I decided to borrow the mask from my close friend Žiga. I reckon you know what movies this mask is from. Well, just in case you don't, it's from the movies Scream and Scary Movie. I don't know if it was used in any other movie but if it was let me know. I know it was used in many commercials though.

I named this piece "Scary Exhibition". It was taken in a hallway in my house and I had to remove one picture in order to put the mask on the wall. It was so much fun taking this photo. I wasn't sure what I wanted to achieve with this picture though. So it actually contains no messages or story like my other shots do. It's just an association with the movies.

About the shot:

EXIF:
- Camera: Canon EOS 400D
- Exposure: 1.3 sec (13/10)
- Aperture: f/5.6
- Focal length: 18mm
- ISO: 100
- Flash: Not fired
- Tripod
- Post-processing software: Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Date taken: 23.11.2007

For this picture I certainly needed a tripod. It wasn't a bright scene and I didn't wanna use artificial light as I prefer natural light in my shots. Don't get me wrong. I use artificial lighting quite a lot but if I can choose between natural and artificial and get a good result with both, I'd go with natural light. So I set up the scene and camera. Then I took a few shots from different angle to see if I like the composition of the scene. When I was happy with it and decided which angle I wanna shoot at I took the shot you see above. I shot it at ISO 100 because I didn't want any noise to show up in the picture. But now it seems that maybe it wouldn't look that bad if the shot was grainy. But it's harder to remove the noise than add an artificial one.

Again I post-processed it in Photoshop. In this case the vignette on the left was natural. So I had to compensate that by adding a vignette on the right side of the picture as well. I also did a small contrast boost, desaturated it by 50% and cropped it at the bottom and the top. I must say that I'm actually very pleased with the way it turned out. What do you think?