Junior Brandon Ignacio is working on his masterpiece. 

What  first seemed like a regular faculty member, now has part of his jaw rotting and missing skin. With a menacing red glow, their left eye looks like its straight out of “The Terminator” film. 

“I’m just finishing it up,” Ignacio said. 

Along with Ignacio, many students in Jennifer Bible’s digital photo class took photographs of faculty and teachers and transformed them into zombies and vampires last month to celebrate Halloween. 

“I like to look around and try to find things that I think students would enjoy,” said Bible. “It’s really a simple layer mask process.”

This process relied on an organization of layers, which consists of images put on top of a base image without changing the base image. They are used to overlay effects or add other images on top of the base image without damaging the original. Visibility of the layers can be toggled as well.

Together with the base image and all the layers on top, it creates a full image.

“It’s like you’re looking down through a whole series of different images and then different parts show themselves and others do not,” Bible said.

Bible went on to explain that being proficient in using layers was important for professional photographers.

“[Layer masks are] something that I used in the professional world a lot because you do not destroy your original pixels of the image,” Bible said, “Therefore it’s a non-destructive form of utilizing Photoshop, which I think is the best practice that students should learn how to do.”

Because photo editing is a meticulous art, students plan everything out ahead of time.

“You gotta see how everything’s gonna pan out,” senior Ryan Ozawa said as he worked on making assistant principal Bob Spain a zombie.  

Ozawa said that he played with Photoshop in the past, but never became proficient with the tool until he enrolled in the  digital photo class. He said that the class rekindled his interest in Photoshop.

Along with making staff members zombies and vampires, students worked on vintage horror movie posters.

“You get old stuff and put it together,” said  junior Tyler Peck as he worked on his movie poster.   

Digital photo does similar projects all throughout the year. Some students said that they use long exposure photos to make interesting photos as well. Such photos allow the camera shutter to capture lots of light over a given period of time, making for cool lighting effects. 

“It takes a while,” siad Ozawa,  who is interested in the project himself and noted that the process could take up to 40 minutes.