Story Behind the Photo for February 2020: Small/Miniature
Michelle Ray
Overview
Usually for our monthly assignments, I have a pretty good idea of what the goal for the assignment is, and how to approach it. This topic was photographing small things, which is not an area that was familiar to me. Photos of small objects, like ....what...exactly? Don’t you need a macro lens for that? Groan. Time to do some online homework, as both my expertise and vision were a bit limited. So, I Googled examples, how-tos, and started looking around the house for items that were interesting and could be put in a diorama setting. I found a carton of toys that had belonged to my sons’ train setup. They are the “Work Guys,” apparently engaged in manual labor. They were hard to stand up. They didn’t have faces. They weren’t detailed. They kept dropping their hammers. But they had interesting tools that could carry things. And I also found 2 matchbox older model trucks.
Goals
Theimageneededtobeinterestingandtechnicallycorrect(exposure,focus,color). It needed to tell a story. One creative element that made an impression was the presence of readily identifiable ordinary items that made the viewer understand that the characters were small. It was important that the viewer get this concept, as it was the goal of the assignment.
The Shoot
I took my stuff outside to the driveway one cold December day before the sun got too high in the sky. Laying down on a blanket, my crutches to one side (I had broken my hip the month before), I started trying to set up equipment, trying different lenses and settings. My Tamron 24-70 wide angle lens did the best in that setting. I could get fairly close, the guys were breaking rocks that were just pebbles, and fixing a crack in the pavement. But my difficulty was the cats. The cats were wrecking my diorama. They kidnapped 2 Work Guys, and batted the pebbles around. They wanted to be petted and bumped up against my camera. Then the mailman drove by and gave me a very strange look and offered to call 911......Hugely embarrassed, I retreated back inside, and really had no usable photos. My husband (who was laughing hysterically) said I looked like a stalker laying in the driveway taking pictures of the neighbors house. Huh? Like what does HE k now about macro photography anyway?
It is now January, and my last opportunity to get this assignment done. To prepare for the RHPC “Miniature” workshop, I packed up my Camera body (Canon EOS-R), the Tamron 24-70 lens, the Canon 70-200 telephoto lens and 1.4 extender, because I had read that this combination, while technically not macro, can get in really close to the subject . I brought the toys and a piece of scrapbook paper that was printed with what looked like cobblestones. In my bag was some Christmas mints leftover from the holiday. And I forgot my tripod, but was able to borrow one from Jim Higgins. (Thanks again, Jim!)
Even after arriving at the workshop, it seemed a long time before inspiration and knowledge finally intersected and got busy. A station that required a trigger to work the studio flashes became available. The station was a long, narrow, table top with a studio flash on either side. There was opaque paper that diffused the light. My Tamron wide angle would not be appropriate, but my Canon telephoto with extender should work fine, right? The trigger from the workshop was mounted in the hot shoe on the camera body, image stabilization on the lens was turned off due to the use of a tripod, and the timer delay was used, because any kind of camera shake would ruin the image.
The Work Guys (only like four of them had survived the cats) liked the flat surface of the table. I put the cobblestoned scrapbook paper down, folding it in half. Half the sheet would be the background, half the sheet would be the foreground. For my more stubborn Work Men, I used gum to prop them up. The gum stuck to the paper, and it was no big deal to hide it behind a pile of “boulders”....But now....now how to arrange them? Their positioning would hopefully draw the eye to the center of the photo.
I took some images using a large aperture, but such shallow depth of field wasn’t working for me. The toys didn’t have a lot of detail to begin with, and then they got more blurry fast. I closed the aperture down some, and increased the exposure time, hoping to get more of the project in focus. That was working better. Then inspiration finally hit and I looked at the bag of mints and realized that would really make this image pop. This would be the item that everyone would recognize....and I found a hammer in the storage room and smashed the candies, and arranged them. I had also decided to make a stacked image, so that more of the diorama would be in focus, but the workshop was over. I quickly took 4 images, and hoped something could be pulled out of them.
Post Processing
The images were somewhat in focus, and over exposed. Hmmm. Well, that made sense since I metered on the darker subjects. I imported the images into Photoshop, picked the one that I felt had the best focus, and started working.
The image was tightly cropped, because the paper edges were showing parts of the table, and I needed to fill the frame with the most relevant subject material.
It was straightened, using the crease as the horizon.
A sharpening filter was applied, and certain parts were chosen for the select sharpening filter.
The highlights were brought down, and the image was dehazed.
In Camera Raw, a brush was selected to increase the exposure of the darker subject objects. Some of the Work Guys were blending into the truck, and that was not ok.
A brush was also used to lower the exposure in the white portion of the candies, and in the background, which were blown out.
A dash of vibrance was added.
The toy truck had a Kellogg’s logo on the sideboard, and that was deliberately obscured with a brush using a decrease in contrast, as it didn’t fit with the construction theme.
A vignette was added, and that really toned down the background, pulled the viewers’ eye to the center of the photo, and pulled out some detail in the background.
The noise was reduced.
The Work Guys had no faces. They were beyond expressionless. Not being a great artist, I chose a soft, round brush, and traced the shadows that seemed to be lurking on the lead Work Guy’s face, and at 100 magnification, he had eyebrow, sort of. The results pleased me.