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Vanitas: Skull & Chessboard

davidsteinmoss
Dec 8, 2015
1 min read

Failed Time Lapse Vanitas: Skull & Chessboard

Attempted a time-lapse shot Vanitas with an homage to Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal 1958. And the scene of the knight playing chess with Death.

The scene was shot in my living room with a black sheet for background, chessboard and the same use of skull and timer. Once the scene was set I would replace the white pieces with black to represent the countdown of time to inescapable death as the skull revolved like a clock in the background.

The scene would be shot as previous with the Nikon D80 tripod mounted with external timer. The timer was set for every at 15 second intervals and I would replace a white chess piece with a black one every 2 mins leaving just the white queen and black king until the last 2 mins of the 60 minute skull revolution where the the white would be replaced by the black queen.

This idea was abandoned halfway through as apparently chess pieces are very interesting things to 9 week old kittens.