Photo Manipulation

[Fragma]

I made this last year at college. The photo was taken when messing around with a few mates at an art gallery. I decided it looked like it could be interesting to manipulate so I gave it a shot and here was the outcome. What do you guys think of it? (Bearing in mind it is over a year ago that I made it). It's pretty basic but I quite liked the result. (Reminds me of the introduction on "The Inbetweeners").

[Untouch]

Um not sure what to say about it but I don't like it.

[Fragma]

Oh What don't you like about it?

[.Fr0z3n]

Too dark in my opinion.

[Fragma]

Too dark in my opinion.

Huh? It's a black and white image lol.

[.Fr0z3n]

Huh? It's a black and white image lol.

I know, but it has this clinging horror effect.

[Fragma]

It's meant to lol. They are 2 hooded people sitting on some steps. (Typical youth of today kind of feel to it).

Thanks for your input anyway.

[JDBar]

It's almost a little too difficult to make out the silhouette on the right. Also it's difficult to tell that they are hooded, and if you didn't tell us they were on stairs I probably would've never realized it.

If you're going for a horrific kind of response, then you need to make your subjects just barely recognizable and I think you're just a little bit below that bar.

Here are some images I think do this well. These are photo-manips based around the internet urban myth of Slenderman.

Spoiler (Click to View)

In these photos, Slenderman is barely distinguishable but the viewer can still tell that there's a man there. But he's different, just different enough from what a person is familiar with when they think of a man (his height). They know he has a face, but they can't distinguish it, and their mind is left with questioning what it is even though it shares features of what they're familiar with. The first image even does this with the faces of the children, but to a slightly lesser extent. It's kind of hard to explain, but that bit of confusion/suspense combined with familiarity/distinguishability needs to be perfect balanced to invoke fear into a person's mind.

[Secret]

I personally don't like it. It is very basic btw.