El Dave Photography

I wasn't expecting much when I bought these Mortal Kombat figures. I have the Kung Lau toy, which is nice, but it's nothing really special. Something about these ninjas makes me really happy, and they're so much fun to shoot!

Brief info RE: Mortal Kombat:

Mortal Kombat is a best-selling series of fighting games created by Ed Boon and John Tobias. Mortal Kombat began as a series of arcade games, which were picked up by Acclaim Entertainment for the home console versions. Now Midway Games exclusively creates home versions of Mortal Kombat. It is especially noted for its digitized sprites (which differentiated it from its contemporaries' hand-drawn sprites), and its high levels of blood and gore, including, most notably, its graphic fatalities—finishing moves, requiring a sequence of buttons to perform, which, in part, led to the creation of the ESRB. The series itself is also known for replacing the hard c sound with the letter K, thus deliberately misspelling the word "combat," as well as other words with the hard c sound (example: "klose" quarters instead of "close" quarters).

In the spirit of Mortal Kombat, I will be using K's instead of hard C's for the rest of this post.

Sub Zero is my default favorite karacter, having the easiest moves and the easiest initial fatality. Plus, I'm always interested in water/ice based karacters. Skorpion, being Sub Zero's nemesis, bekame my nemesis as well. Heading out to the forest preserve, I had to pik a day when it was above freezing to keep my kamera from being frozen solid. I found some small stiks and twigs that were skaled just righ- You know what? No more K's.

The most important thing about shooting outdoors is to find a backdrop that works with the size of your toys and doesn't pull the viewer away and remind them that they're looking at a toy. The goal is always to make the scene as realistic as possible; in this case, Sub Zero and Scorpion are in the middle of a fight, with Scorpion being slammed into a tree.

Processing in Photoshop got started with a Lab Color treatment, then a series of radial blurs centered on Scorpion to draw the eye in and create the illusion of motion. If fight scenes weren't so difficult to pull off, I'd be tempted to do this all the time.

Sub Zero wins...EXIFity:

Camera:	Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Exposure:	0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture:	f/9
Focal Length:	24 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 7.0
Date and Time:	2008:12:06 13:21:59
YCbCr Positioning:	Co-Sited
Exposure Program:	Aperture priority
Date and Time (Original):	2008:12:03 12:50:42
Date and Time (Digitized):	2008:12:03 12:50:42
Shutter Speed:	456510/65536
Metering Mode:	Pattern
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Focal Plane X-Resolution:	4433.295 dpi
Focal Plane Y-Resolution:	4453.608 dpi
Compression:	JPEG
Image Width:	2592 pixels
Image Height:	3888 pixels

Be good,
-Dave

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