ISO 400 | 110mm | f 4.0 | 1/80 sec

Have you ever felt trapped, stuck, or like you’ve gone too far and there’s no way back?  Full of regrets and second-thoughts, you attempt to retrace your steps, but find that you can’t return the way you came.  Forced onward by the hope that escape is only a few footsteps away, you push ahead, hoping against hope to find another way out.

Slowly but surely, your path becomes narrower, sloping gradually inward, converging at a single point not yet distinguishable.  Perhaps your journey is nearing an end?  Could it be that your hope of release lies at the point where these two walls meet?  Sparked onward with rejuvenated hope, you spring forward – quickly at first, but gradually your progress diminishes as you attempt to inch your way along, trying desperately to squeeze your way the last few feet to your desired freedom and hoped-for end.

Exhausted, discouraged, and on the verge of tears, you push aside your tendencies towards claustrophobia, and with one last courageous effort, hurl your body forward in a final attempt at gaining your freedom.  But alas, you find yourself no closer to your goal than when you had begun and in a situation much more dire than your starting point.  And that’s when you feel the walls start to close-in on you…

This scene truly depicts some of people’s worst nightmares.  If only such situations took place strictly in dream-land things would be ok.  Unfortunately, people find themselves in tight spots (between a rock and a hard place) all the time in life.  Though such situation are often unavoidable, the trick is in how we handle those times in our lives.

Our natural tendency is to panic, get depressed, worry, etc.  But God wants to show Himself strong on our behalf.  If we would only call out to Him in these seemingly dire situations, He would gladly show us the way of escape.  Oh how much we suffer because we fail to take our eyes off of our situations and place them on the One who is truly in control…

It was kind of tricky to create this location.  There aren’t any places like it that I’m aware of, so I knew I would have to use some photography techniques and a little Photoshop to create the scene I had in mind.

The image above shows the setup.  All the light was daylight filtered through a Tungsten white-balance (giving it that bluish hue).  The images were all shot horizontally and then rotated in post (mostly because I wanted a shot of me standing, but couldn’t find any walls with a texture like the floor, plus I found that gravity was actually in my favor and aided in giving the image more of that “squished” look when I was lying down).

I also placed a board over the top of me to give me a reference point for the other wall in post (as well as to act as a gobo for the ambient light, creating more realistic shadows on my back, etc.)

Here’s the original shot.  You can see how the board above me blocks the ambient light, leaving my back in shadow (as if there’s a wall behind me), and it also gives us a good idea of how the other wall should look when I place it in post.

Here’s the shot of the floor without any other objects in the foreground.  This was the shot I used to create the wall behind me (just rotate it and place it, simple as that).