El Dave Photography

On Flickr there is a group called Plastic 52, which is a photo project where you choose a toy from your collection and take a photo of it every week for a year. I have already completed the project once with my wide assortment of Iron Man figures, and wanted to try again using my vinyl Uglydoll named Wage. Because I've been falling behind, I'm going to include the project here as a way to keep me on track and go a little bit into how the shot was done.

This picture features Wage (the orange one on the left) and Wedgehead, who is buried in the leaves. My main goal with these Plastic 52 shots is to try and work different creative muscles than I normally use. Somehow, taking shots of burning alleyways with lots of knives and lasers doesn't seem appropriate with Wage.

I wanted to get a cute autumn shot with Wage, and playing in the leaves definitely fits the bill. Working with my beautiful assistant, we set about gathering leaves and covering Wedgehead. The only problem we ran into was that the leaves we had gathered were from the same spot we were taking the shot, so there weren't any leaves in the background. Sure, we could have just put a rake or something in the back, but it just didn't look right.

Processing in Photoshop was thankfully simple. I tweaked the colors a little and added some film grain, and that was it.

With as easy as this shot was, I'm left wondering why I spend so long on my studio shots...

If you can read this, you are EXIF:

Camera:	Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure:	0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	55 mm
ISO Speed:	400
Exposure Bias:	0/3 EV
Flash:	Flash did not fire

Orientation:	Horizontal (normal)
X-Resolution:	72 dpi
Y-Resolution:	72 dpi
Software:	Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows
Date and Time:	2008:11:17 14:01:12
YCbCr Positioning:	Co-Sited
Exposure Program:	Aperture priority
Date and Time (Original):	2008:11:02 13:55:22
Date and Time (Digitized):	2008:11:02 13:55:22
Shutter Speed:	500948/65536
Metering Mode:	Pattern
Color Space:	sRGB
Focal Plane X-Resolution:	4433.295 dpi
Focal Plane Y-Resolution:	4453.608 dpi
White Balance:	Manual
Compression:	JPEG
Image Width:	3888 pixels
Image Height:	2592 pixels

Be good,
-Dave

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