Fever Dream Academy

Behind The Scenes

The photos in this project were taken in November of 2020 when I still had my Sony A7RII. The pandemic had already taken its toll, and I needed to get out of the house and feel a sense of adventure. I didn’t have to travel far from home, to find this place. Along the route of my usual travels that I take to just get away for a bit, I took a few turns of the wheel from my normal route, out of curiosity of where it would lead. I ended up in an area that felt abandoned. Only rare occurences of drivers passing by and vacant buildings gave me feelings that I had been transported to the setting of Springwood from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and various other locations I would associate with 80’s and 90’s movie looks and locations. For more modern. reference, it felt like a location of the stealth mission “All Ghillied Up” from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

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The megapixel count gave every photo a crisp cinematic appearance, with beautiful contrasts and exposure caught in-camera. The photos were taken with a high aperture (F/22) and an exposure of 1/50, as I wanted to capture as much detail and didn’t desire huge contrasts in focal depth. Technical stuff aside, I simply wanted to convey how I actually experienced the environment as I was there. Once I captured the images, I edited them by increasing exposure, reducing the contrast in some areas, and altering the colors enough to appear as if things were captured with an infrared camera. The bloom-like effects can be seen in the unedited photos, and I retained their presence in their surreal edits.

Overall, these are among my favorite photos I’ve both taken and edited. Sometimes I take photos without knowing how I’d like them to be edited or presented, but this was one of those moments where it all turned out better than expected.