The final creative project for my still life unit in college. A recreation of the government’s Covid-19 advice graphic using my favourite tiny railway model people.
Hands – Hand sanitiser swimming pool complete with Baywatch lifeguard. Face – A discarded face mask ski slope. Has various levels of difficulty. Space – Get your health and safety signage painted by our elite crew of painters. Don’t worry they do clean up after themselves.
All done as set ups on my desk top. It’s one of the easiest things to do. The fight I had with photoshop at 1am to put the work together however…..
Today’s college project. Learned that the model train figues are a little too small to be taken outside into the wild. I’ll probably keep them to desktop set ups where they can be carefully placed and secured. But lego figures…. now there’s a scale that works well in the wild.
Before Christmas Wex, that purveyor of fine camera equipment, taker of wages, and destroyer of credit cards, ran a competition. There were 3 categories; food, family, and festivities. Here’s all the winning photos.
At Work in the Chocolate Coin Mines
Well I sent this in as an entry in the food category and it, somehow, magically, came first. I know I’m still slightly speechless. This is actually the first time a photo of mine has won anything. It was a slightly ridiculous set up in my bedroom to capture these tiny model railway road workers. What made me laugh was the number of models that were not actually doing any work. The dude with the clipboard is clearly the foreman though.
What it looked like from behind the camera
So with my camera on the tripod, which was more of an after thought actually. I spent 2 packs of chocolate coins getting the stacks right. They were meant to be for my nephews but I did replace them. These tiny model people don’t stand so well by themselves so they are often stuck to the ground with glue dots or parts of them.
As for camera settings, with a tripod you can get away with massively long shutter speeds. So ISO 100 and a tiny aperture to get a depth of field. I might have gotten slightly better results with a macro lens but the 24-105mm f4 lens does have a macro setting. Next time I’ll try focus stacking with Affinity photo. So there’s sharpness from the front all the way to the back. I settled the focus point on the face of the work foreman, in case you are wondering. No post processing either. It came out just the way I wanted it, with a bit of practice.
Building the decorations
I did another set up but it wasn’t as effective. Although the guys are standing around not working very hard here.
Selkie’s Photography 