I've been trying to dig myself out of the doldrums lately and find something new to try so I went out and bought some toy dinosaurs to work with. Here are a few of the photos I got with them which I would welcome your thoughts on. The little models are too new looking so they shine a bit - I am planning on repainting them carefully with acrylic paint to get a more natural look about them, but that is going to take a little time. The ground foliage is moss and the trees are the seed buds from my passion flowers. I created the mist effect with an e-cig with the vapour blown gently through some small bore plastic piping. The lighting is from a 27 LED video light bank. I should add that the model dinosaurs are about 1 inch high. Any thoughts please gents?
You can get a clear nail varnish that mattifies whatever nail varnish is underneath it - that would probably work too and because it comes in a small nail varnish sized bottle you wouldn't be buying more than you need. Great idea though - love those trees!
Thanks for the positive comments guys. I will give the Matt nail varnish a go to see if that takes the shine off them. If it doesn't then I will spend time repainting them by hand with some matt acrylic paint that I have in my art work box. I will then also try using different colours of background as suggested and maybe a little backlighting as well. I have some larger dinosaurs in the of tub of models that I got so might get out and try some outdoor locations as well (When the weather allows me to) to see if I can get enough DOF to make give the shots a much more realistic background. I appreciate all thoughts, ideas, suggestions and comments offered!
Hah, love those. The mist is excellent. Dunno how you are with lego, but there's quite a big group of folk who do lego mini-figure photography as well. Any matt varnish would work, if you've already got acrylics, do you not have some matt varnish knocking around? Or, just pretend it's raining. In fact, let's see if you can make it rain in some shots, some fine mist falling down should do it!
Aye, those look like fun. Next week you'll be shooting adverts for Audi! (saw one the other day done with a £40 model of the R8)
I have sprayed them with an aerosol Matt "Sealer" (Varnish) which has taken most of the shine off them. They do look a bit better, I tried one outdoors yesterday and it didn't look too bad - See the attached photo - Not so shiny even though it was wet. I am now working on getting some larger and more detailed model dinosaurs to use for an outdoor shoot I want to try. If it works then fine but if it doesn't then it will at least have got me out for some exercise and fresh air! Thanks for the tip/suggestion, I will give it a go when I'm next working with the dinosaurs indoors.
