"How I did it" for littlemav - a 10 will get you a lot of description :-)
The problem was that I didn't have a model for this, proper lighting nor any camera other than my smartphone, so I had to improvise with nearly every aspect of this to get what I got - it took a lot of effort, even though the results aren't perfect. Especially because every shot it required a completely new setting up as I also don't have a camera stand. I would imagine with some proper kit it would be much easier to achieve something much better.
I couldn't shoot a real person, so I had to make James Bond. I drew his outline on paper, transferred this to card and cut it out with a Stanley Knife. This was the hardest part, actually. Drawing him. I'm not very good and it took a long time to do. The figure I made is just over half as tall as a normal Lego figure.
After I had my Card Bond, I glued him to some more transparent paper. This I held to a bright light (the sun) because having brightness at the back gives a relatively solid outline of the figure, gives a 'white' background and it also illuminates the "gun barrel" (which is just a cardboard roll).
Now, because I was only using my phone camera I didn't have explicit control over the exposure and focus settings. So, when I focused on the figure, he was properly exposed but the inside of the chute wasn't. When I focused on the inside of the cardboard, that was properly exposed, but the man was out of focus. I spent a lot of time trying to get a sensible exposure of the scene. I was hesitant to do multiple exposures for HDR because I wasn't certain that the images would be properly aligned which might shove the image towards DQ territory. Any Android camera app recommendations anyone?
Editing was simple enough. Darken the edges with a vignette, enhance some contrast on the card to get more definition on the spiral, dodge/burn card/spiral/man. Sharpen. Done. Most of this was done on my phone.
Got validated early on in the challenge. The hardest thing about the validation was finding the original photo - the editing process is highly disorganised with a phone-based pipeline. I had to search through about 200 very similar photos before I found the original. And then when I found it I downloaded the "original" file from Google+ (it's automatically backed up there) but those files are edited by Google, apparently. Found the original eventually, and it passed validation.
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OMG I am more than totally impressed!!! a PHONE... A PHONE AND A STANLEY KNIFE... You are a Rocket Scientist!!!! I am so inspired by this! You jerked my dead brain cell into creative mode! THANKS!! (I think it's totally underrated, should have been at least in the TT) It looks so freaking real James Bond, now I wonder if they shot the real one with a paper roll and a cut out?? :P
AWESOME!!!!!!! Oh I hope you post what you did to get this effect, I'm sure you shot thru something, but I don't think it's a toilet paper roll... 10..(if you tell me what you did) LOL
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