Okay, this was fun to do. I read an article about Allan Weitz and his toy series //www.allanweitz.com and thought they were neat photos. When this challenge came up I decided to give it a try.
First I needed to find a toy. I started off with a "flying" toy but found it very difficult to get it to stay still (something that is needed for long exposure). Then I decided that I would go look in some antique stores for an old toy car of sorts (since my kid's idea of an old toy is a Sega Genesis game).
I live near the town of Boerne which has a main street lined with antique stores. I checked all of the stores without any success. One of the shop owners let me know that there was going to be an antique fair over the weekend at the fair grounds... so on Saturday I hit the antique fair.
All sorts of stuff ranging from "junk" to nice furniture pieces where for sale. After walking through three buildings of antiques I finally found it! The perfect piece. An old yellow, metal, toy car. Just the right amount of distress and dings. It will be perfect... except they want $240 for it! Yikes! Can't justify that for a photo challenge.
So back to digging through the kids stuff when I came across my son's pinewood derby car collection. It's cheap, looks distressed, and is the perfect size.
Setup: I put the car on top of a box with a sheet of black paper under it. A couple of feet behind it I had a presentation board with a blanket hanging over it. I set the camera to F9.0, 20sec exposure with film speed at 100 ISO. The camera was timer triggered to reduce shake. The camera lense had a diffuse filter on it to give it a softer focus.
Initially, I had a flashlight with a paper cone fashioned around the end to reduce the light beam but that was too bright so I poked a hole in a peice of cardboard and used that to restrict the light beam. When the camera timer would go off I would "paint" various portions of the car. Then I put the flash light behind the car, pulled the cardboard off, and pointed at the backdrop. A piece of tape on the backdrop was my target so I could get the affect of the highlight.
Post processing:
Raw Shooter Premium:
- Set color tempurature
- crop
- convert to tiff
Photoshop Elements 4.0
- Dust and scratches with the threshold 0 and radius 1 to remove the hot pixels from the long exposure.
- saturation
- some levels
- resize for submission
- USM
- save to web
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I have to admit...I'm flattered. You should try to play up the diffusion part a bit more. Part of what makes my toy pix work is the way they drift in and out of focus. You might want to try shaping the background light to play off the swoopy shape of the car.
Most of all...keep having fun.
-Allan Weitz
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