The Story Behind the Photo

February 2023: Paper by Patrick Hanley

I was stumped as to what to do for paper so I started doing some internet searches for paper photography. I found a website for a photographer named Catherine MacBride who works out of Dublin Ireland and one of her specialties is paper photography. I was very impressed with her ability to tell a story with paper, she is extremely clever in the way she uses paper and light to create scenes.

There was a fair amount of planning went into getting the shot. I made 2 different trailers and several trees before getting the ones that are in the final shot. I hand drew and then cut out the trees with an Exacto knife, I glued popsicle sticks to the back of the trees. For the leaves, I ran red, yellow and orange construction paper through our cross-cut paper shredder, for the ground I used green tissue paper. For the fire pit I used red, orange and yellow construction paper for the flames, and black paper for the outside fire ring.

The trailer is 3 dimensional and took the most time to build. I wanted a trailer with a curved roof line that looked like a vintage trailer and a door that opened.

The scene itself is inspired by property that we own on the Naches River in Eastern Washington. We have a camping trailer, a couple of large Oak trees and a fire ring on the property, so this is a fair representation of our home away from home.

Equipment used was a Manfrotto tripod, my Canon 5d Mk IV and a shutter release cable. I used a Sigma Art 35mm 1.4 set to f16, ISO 800 for 1.6 seconds.

For the lighting I used a string of white fairy light inside the trailer, for the fire I also used fairy lights but these were orange to simulate the fire. I ran three of the orange lights above the fire to create the embers floating in the air, I had to go back and clone stamp out the wire so that it wouldn’t show in the final image. To create the moon light I used a small LED lantern with tissue paper over the lens to diffuse the light.

For the processing I started in Lightroom with some basic adjustments and then sent the photo to Adobe Camera Raw where I continued to edit the photo. One of the last edits that I did was to use apply a fairly dark vignette, I also used one of the cinematic presets in ACR to give the photo a cinematic feel. The last edit was done in Viveza to make final adjustments to the color and tonality of the photo. Because it was paper, I wanted colors that were not 100% accurate but colors and tones that helped to create a mood or vibe.

I really enjoyed the challenge of this assignment and creating the scene.