Before/after of Haunting Memories

I got an amazing response and huge support for my photo Haunting Memories (more than 45k views on 500px alone as I type this) and I gratefully thank you! I thought I could also share the idea and technical details behind it as well. During a house clean-out I was left with a big bag of old postcards. I've kept them under my desk for months because I knew the right idea will present itself sooner or later. I hate wasting nice props on lousy ideas, so I always take my time to figure out what it is I want to do.

In the beginning I wanted to create a story about two people who are way too shy to admit their feelings to one another. The postcards without stamps are those that were written, but never sent.

The other idea came to me a while later, because my boyfriend never seemed to be around for the shoot at the right time of day or he would forget to bring the clothes I wanted. I pictured the postcards falling on the subject and how they might arise questions that shouldn't be answered, a past that should stay in the past and should be forgotten.

That was my main idea for the shoot and prompted me to jump into the role of the model one freezing evening. I didn't have enough postcards to cover the whole frame so I did a composite later in Photoshop. My camera was positioned on my balcony and that was the place where I threw heaps of postcards from. I wonder what the neighbors thought though!

In order to have a nice believable perspective in the final image, I stitched a few photos together so that the postcards would be in different stages of falling down.