Time Management Disorder

The idea behind my project consists of me representing a person who works under pressure and it cannot manage his time, hence the theme title, time management disorder.

This image will represent a small portion of my daily routine, which due to way of thinking, I get stressed, I become angered by the twisted mentality which embraces my thinking and takes control of my retention power and the importance of keeping my temper.

The reason behind this reaction of losing temper defines the frustration that lies deep into me by not being able to do everything I have planned, the things I love to do and the fear of not being able to achieve that climax of my existence to overcome my condition and to evolve mentally, professionally and spiritually.

The main subject is gonna show and angered expression, flanked by two ghosting silhouettes showing me working under pressure with two different expressions: depression and focused concentration.

The mood is gonna be chaos. Natural light, movement, flour lifted in the air, cookies flying into the air, and a smoke machine behind me to accentuate the hot air floating in the kitchen witch is gonna represent my hot temper.

I don't have any images to show as an example because there is nothing on the internet that I can use as an approximation to the theme I chose.

I used the natural light from a window close to the table, an improvised background by using a blue bed blanket which I used in the image below as well, a reflector to light the shaded part of my face (just a bit) so that any expression will be easily visible.
Behind I will mount a fill light to get a small contour of the head. On the table, I will have a cutting board with some cookies and a lot of flour. the flour its gonna be lifted in the air from hitting the cutting board with my palms, cookies mounted to the lighting fixture or ceiling with nylon thread to get the impression of them flying in the air.

The two ghosting silhouettes will work on both sides of me. One in the right placing some cookies into an oven pan and the one from the left, "painting" a flying cookie with a brush by using egg yolk. (this idea was not implemented due to lack of space and a wider objective)

For the focusing option, I used a Rollei wireless trigger remote.
Aperture was wide open to get as much light possible into the sensor since my photoshoot included a lot of movement and I wanted to freeze the most of it.
The camera was set on high burst mode (I get 5 or 6 fps with my entry-level body) and set to 10 seconds timer.
The remote button pressed to lock it on the "Hold" mode and a lot of takes to get the best shot.

For the camera and light set-up, I have used only natural light that was coming from the window and a reflector to lit my face and the background behind me a little more.
Nothing fancy because I knew exactly how I wanted the final image to look and this setup was enough to achieve the result

This was my first attempt. These two were the favorites at that moment but overall, the photo shooting was a failure because I was not achieving the results I planned, the light was disappointing and my facial expression bland.
I dreamed of flying cookies and more movement and drama.

And there were a lot of fails as well. I had a hard time to shoot the right expression, without getting scared from hitting the table too hard :)

This was the best image that I shot, not perfect but enough to get the most out of it in photoshop.

And after some basic adjustments and color grading in Lightroom, it ended looking like this. (The background was detailed later in photoshop using some "flying" flour from another picture, by simply overlaying the image and deleting what was extra by using a layer mask).
The nylon strings were deleting by selecting them with the Lasoo tool and deleting them by using the content-aware fill function.

On the next step, I added some layers to manipulate the color a little more, like selective color and adding that light pop in the eyes.

Next, I applied a texture over the entire image with a mask applied to it. I deleted the texture from my face leaving the effect to be visible only around my body.

On the next step, I applied adjustment curves to the entire image to crush the black and the highlights, a selective color pop on the hat, a vintage-style vignette and a fill light from the left side of my face.

And finally, I applied a subtle vintage-like film effect with some little white dirt specks floating around me.