Dark Series - The Witches Lure
From the beginning of this project I really wanted to create a shoot about a Witch, I had this idea of a Witch with a dark beauty who would enchant and lure unsuspecting passers by to their deaths, though cruel in nature to her she truly did love her victims but could not help what she was.
So with this core idea in mind I began looking for models online using model sites and social media and couldn’t believe my luck when I came across an enigmatic model named Annemieke, Annemieke was everything I could have hoped for, she was a model who was drawn to darker themes and this showed in all her work, what particularly drew me to this individual however was not only their style but their artwork. Annemieke as well as a great model is also a great artist.
You can see some of her work here: https://www.instagram.com/bluefernarts
After seeing Annemieke’s artwork I knew that this was someone who would be able to inject some truth into this dark character and make them believable. There were other models I came across but I was drawn to her character and aesthetic so much that I set up a trip to Belgium to go and shoot her for this project.
For this shoot we gave ourselves a few days in Belgium, now I’ll be honest I’m used to scouting locations in the UK and usually find it quite fun but trying to scout locations in another country with limited time was difficult. When trying to find suitable locations before the trip I found Google maps can only get you so far especially when looking for a forest with a suitable lake. So instead I found four forests close to Annemieke and within an hour or so drive of each other so that we could see them all in a day.
4 forests, 8 hours and 10 energy drinks later we found a forest that would be perfect for what we had planned. (This was actually the third forest we visited by which time I was ready to call it a day but with the ‘what if’ voices sounding in our ears we still made the trip to the fourth forest which even though wasn’t right at least let us know that the third choice was definitely the best option we had found.
On the day of the shoot we arrived at the location a few hours early and began moving and setting up the equipment we would be using. When Annemieke arrived Georgina got started on the makeup and I got to work finalising the lighting setup.
Here are some images of the set up below:
As you can see in the image above the final set up I went with was a three light set up using two Broncolor Siros 800L’s and a Profoto B10, the large Octabank off camera left acted as my key light and washed light across the scene, I kept fairly it low to the ground and angled slightly downwards to create a nicer fall off of light across Annemieke, the beauty dish with grid was placed right in front of our subject and used to accentuate the skeleton and Annemieke, the Profoto B10 our third light was placed behind our subject on the lowest power setting to fill in some of the shadow created by the beauty dish.
Annemieke was great to work with, I explained the concept again and we went over the mood boards together and that was it, she got to work bringing this character to life.
We decided to bring along a skeleton formerly known as Frederick (seen in the image above) the week before we left as I’d had a sudden idea of posing Annemieke with a skeleton, really wanting to show in one image the dangers of wanting something too much and the dark love that this Witch had towards her victims. Surprisingly the addition of Frederick became one of my favourite parts of the shoot, not only did it help to convey my idea visually but it gave Annemieke something to interact with, which she did in a dark and beautiful way.
See some more behind the scene shots and the final image below:
Final image:
Annemieke has a very interesting tattoo that ends with a spider hanging from a web at the bottom of her leg which lent itself to the image beautifully, I made sure to position her in a way to showcase the tattoo as much as Annemieke herself.
For the final shot of the day we headed to the lake we had scouted the day before.
I walked Annemieke through the idea again as I knew I would need to shoot quickly once she got into the lake. The plan was for me to shoot Annemieke once in sinister makeup and a dark jacket which I found on a website called ‘Violent Delights’ https://www.violentdelights.co.uk (a great online store with an amazing selection of outfits that suit a darker genre). Then I would shoot Annemieke nude in a similar position, I then planned to use the sinister looking image as a reflection to the nude image giving the idea that she is not all that she seems;
Here are two of the images as an example of the movements I got Annemieke to mirror.
Here’s a short clip of me photographing Annemieke in the lake.
However once I got back to the UK and began working on the images I found that it did not sit as nicely as I had planned and so I decided to stick solely with the nude image choosing a more welcoming pose, I then implemented some skulls which can be seen if you look very closely into the shadows. For me this worked out better than my original idea for after testing the image out with a few close friends I found that they were drawn to the nude woman in the lake and it took them a long time to notice the skulls and for some they did not notice the skulls at all. This was precisely what I wanted to convey in the image, rather than an obvious evil which my original idea would have shown this idea forces the viewer to look a little closer, see below:
This was my first time doing a project like this and I quickly discovered the importance and difficulty of telling a story within one image. I am used to shooting many images, telling a story over many frames but for this project I needed the viewer to be able to look at any of the images and understand the story.
Here are the final images from the shoot including a different composition for the skeleton and lake images:
After I finished working on the images I decided to make a few prints for myself and fell in love with the images even more, see some of my prints below:
After seeing the prints I knew I wanted to do more with this series and so I am happy to say that I am offering five of the images from this shoot as limited edition prints which are now available on my new shop, https://williamhenryshop.com/dark-series-prints the printing will be handled personally by me here in the UK to ensure the quality of each print prior to shipping. Please feel free to check out the prints using the link here or at the top in the menu bar and don’t forget to sign up to my mailing list at the bottom of this page if you wish to hear more about this ongoing project as well as other future projects and limited edition prints.