Reptile-mania-insania

Taking pictures of kite festivals wasn't the only thing I did in my January photography class. You see, we had to make an entire project based off of a random subject line from a spam email, drawn out of a bag. Mine was:

533 reptiles stolen from wildlife park

So many possibilities, but obviously I decided to make shitty cardboard-duct-tape-pipe-cleaner costumes for my friends and coerce them into dressing up as reptiles. Seemed the most logical, right?

The first day I started to make costumes, I got my awesome friend Sarah to help. We both figured it would be easy to get people to wear our fantastic outfits, so we went excitedly to Brian's room after a few hours of working. His roommates were surprisingly reluctant.

Begging and pleading and begging a tad more did work eventually, and I got some pretty quality photos that day:

 

[Nick Ramberg was a  stegosaurus of some sort.]

[Brian was a sensitive dragon]

 [with a definite coy side.]

 [And good ol' Paul was a snake.]

Luckily my teacher found the combination of (admittedly crappy) costumes and sets really funny and urged me to keep going and make it even more elaborate and stupid. Hooray!

Shelby posed for me and hers turned out to be some of the best:

[Lady Gaga-esque? Chameleon.]

[Might be my ultimate favorite.]

My good luck kept coming when my mom agreed to play:

[A reptile shocked by its reflection.]

 Things got even better. A guest artist came to my college to help us make an on-site artwork. It was going to be a giant cardboard collard green, but there wasn't enough time to paint the leaves so we ended up with a hideous duct-tape and cardboard tree-like thing. This was my moment. Or should I say, Sarah and Chris's

[Shallow depth of field]

[Deep depth of field... "deep depth" sounds wrong.]

[At this point I have no idea what kind of reptiles they were.]

[But they looked pretty awesome.]

The final photo shoot was just a 23 minute free-for-all with random costume parts and set pieces all over the place. 

[Chris makes a good anxious turtle.]

Chris called the costumes "repties," a play on the little know cult/club of furries, people who dress in animal suits for fun. He wanted the subtitle of the project to be "Reptie Convention 2011."

Sometime this semester I might be able to print out more, if so, you will see them!