Photo project
Dragons' Cave

This is a photo from a big project in the second course of photography in high school. The theme for the project was Series Magic, where the interpretation was totally free, but the resulting photo was going to be either a series of photos that together told a story, or just one photo that told the whole story.

First I started building up an initial idea about my project. I liked to play with light in photos, which made me go for a darker theme where I could do interesting things with light. I found some monsters from a Warhammer collection and other characters like that and got the idea of having a goblin and dragon in a cave-like setting. The story that was to be told in this series was going to be really short. The goblin was going to kill the dragon. I built a simple setting to act as a cave, made of some cardboard pieces. Then I shot a lot photos and tried to get the dragon’s fire good. The fire was made with a simple lighter with a longer tip during a long exposure.

After having shot a lot of photos that ended up as four photos in a series, I still felt it could be done better. So I started doing a serious model of the the cave. It was a big cardboard box which I made look more like a cave with papier-mâché, some paint and gravel on the ground. When I added the fire it turned into a really good mood in the photo. But after some test shots I quickly realised that the small goblin character was lost in the gravel and was hard to see in the photos. So I decided to change the theme some to be two dragons fighting each other. The dragons were a lot easier to distinguish from the background and got a better effect.

All the way to the end I had my mind set to make it a series of four images, but in the very end I realised that one image was well enough to deliver the message. In this photo the fire was made by a piece of paper (between the dragons), that I set on fire while taking a long exposure photo.

The photo was then in an exhibition the school had during a special day in my town called Kulturnatt (a night full of cultural activities). I have also won first prize in a photo competition at DreamHack with this photo.