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Ashes in the sky

jonathoncomfortreed

Published: Mar 2, 2011

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Description

Project 52, week 6
^{[my theme]}
The song: In My Teeth (view the music video on YouTube here)
The lyrics:

I felt a black man in my teeth, what a way;
Jesus is coming, he acts my age, and he always looks the same;
I said a good seed was on your break wasn't a mistake anyway.
Well Jesus is coming better act our age
And clean everything
And make a seem.

Like you never really needed it anyway,
Yep, you never really needed it anyways, okay, okay.

John spoke a theory straight in to my brain;
God damn did you mean to do that to me.
Well Jesus don't come round,
Unless we pray each day for 500 days.

I don't know what you want anymore.
No, I don't know what you want anymore.

So we can see
That you never really needed it anyway.
No, you never really needed it anyway.

So we can see
That the bottom going to bury us anyway.
So I am doing what I gotta to stay awake.
Yeah, I am doing what I gotta to stay awake, okay.

What happens when I don't know what happens.
What happens when I don't know what happens.

Just stop and go and stop and go till you can't go run anymore.
Just stop and go and stop and go till you can't go.

Make it seem
Like we never really needed it anyway.
Yeah, we never really needed it anyway.

So we can see
That the bottom gonna bury us anyway.
Yeah, you're doing you gotta to stay awake.
Yeah, I am doing what I gotta to stay awake.

The inspiration: It was mainly the Biblical context of this song that inspired me. I listened to it, paid particular attention to the "Jesus is coming" theme and pretty quickly decided to use that cross necklace. I've had that necklace for as long as I can remember, and I have no idea where it came form. But I really like the natural style, what with the wood and hemp and all that.

Anyways, I was trying out a couple close up shots of the cross, trying to think of what I wanted the setting to be, when I remembered that text looks pretty cool with a shallow depth of field. It didn't take long for me to go grab my Bible (yeah, that's my Bible there) and bring it down to where I was doing the shoot. I spent a while flipping through the pages, trying to think of what Bible story would fit with the song best. Obviously I was looking through the New Testament, when I saw this header. "The Coming of the Holy Spirit" seemed perfect (if you're curious, the Pentecost story is about the disciples experiencing the inspiration of the Holy Spirit after Jesus was resurrected… "violent wind" and "tongues of flame" and all that.).

The technique: Obviously I had a really large aperture for this shot. As you can probably tell from the shadows underneath the cross, I had several light sources set up. Once I'd set the shutter speed and fixed the focus on the the header, it was just a matter of changing the angle of the cross until it looked the way I wanted.

My two favourite parts of this image are the focus on the darker piece of hemp above the cross, and also how parts of the paper is semi-transparent. Look at the empty space around "The Coming" – the shadows of letters look really interesting.