In order to create this image, I went through some heavy metal band's covers, and found that Iron Maiden's ones were quite interesting. They are consistent in style, feature "Eddie", their mascot, and depict dramatic situations: I liked them, and decided to try and create another one.

"Hallowed Be Thy Name" is one of their classic song. Instead of illustrating what is actually happening in it from an external point of view, I wanted to show how it could have been perceived by the sentenced unfortunate person, in his imagination. From there, the idea of using Eddie to represent the condemned man's perception of lack of God came quickly.

Some words about the photos:
- The background is composed of photos of sky, at night. I was out almost every night of the week with my camera, until I got lucky and shot what I was hoping for: the moon clearly appearing in a hole, in a very cloudy sky. There was a lot of wind, and the clouds were moving fast: I had to use a fast shutter, and consequently, rise the ISOs, even at f/2.8. Fortunately, the camera did the job well, and denoising the result was not a problem. As you probably guessed, these moon shots became the eyes of Eddie.
- The bell is the one at my garden's door. I had to unscrew it, bring it to the home studio, and shot it by emulating the light coming out of Eddie's eyes.
- The man is composed of 2 photos of me: one with a rope around the neck, but with the feet on the ground, and another where I lift myself, holding a beam, so that my legs were in adequate position. I blended the 2 photos in post production.

The processing wasn't too long. The light around the eyes was mostly good, so I didn't have to change much things: I simply burned darker lines in order to create the wrinkles, composing Eddie's face. I would have thought it to be extremely difficult, but in fact, using a tablet, it went quite smoothly. The same technique was used for the hand: I chose another image of clouds where the light was close to what I wanted, pasted it as a new layer over the picture, then masked it in the wanted shape and burned wrinkles again. Finally, I created some shadows on the bell, added the blood, some blue filters for good measure, and that was it.