tonight’s picture may not look like much. indeed, flickr has a ton of pictures with these little wooden guys. i bought him on the clearance rack at our local hobby store. the clearance rack! really, could i set the bar any lower for tonight’s post?
well, if it’s any consolation, tonight’s post isn’t about the picture itself. really, it’s the idea surrounding the picture. i saw a video this week that inspired me and gave me a few ideas for a shoot. initially, the concept involved a number of self portraits, but as the week went on, the idea transitioned from a self portrait to using this little guy. one benefit of using this particular stand-in is that i don’t have to be in the picture, and he has my same proportions. the downside is that he’s only 10 inches tall, and that presents a number of challenges. filling the frame with such a small model would involve some macro work, and lighting on a smaller scale is something that i don’t have much experience with. hooray, a challenge!
so tonight’s picture was just sort of feeling the whole thing out. i used the d70 again connected to an sb600 behind a shoot through umbrella. i had the smaller extension tube between the camera and the 70-300/f4.5-5.6. i shot from slightly below the model, in a pretty dark room with a black background on the wall behind the figure. focusing was a bit of a challenge because i had to turn the lights off in the room to get it dark enough for the black background, and the auto focus had a hard time seeing the subject in order to focus. when i shoot the project “for real”, i’ll have the camera on a tripod and have the focus point set in advance. which is precisely what tonight was for; to identify those things that will help make the final shoot easier.
again tonight, i pulled the images in to aperture and did some minor adjustments, including a slight crop to get in closer to the subject. all in all, it was a pretty useful exercise, and hopefully i’ll stay motivated to do this particular project in the next week.
but for now, it’s time to get to bed. it was a very full day, complete with taxes, yoga, grocery, dinner, and now the 8th of 365 photographs and blog posts. that seems like such a long time to go!
