Attached to the boom behind the scene is a transparency of a sunny sky. I often use large, backlit transparencies for backdrops. This blue-sky background was how I originally saw the image. Images appear as complete scenes before I start to make them, but I adapt them as the build and the shoot progress, and this one lost the background to a much tighter framing. It’s not unusual for a scene to be simplified in the process of shooting. Looking through the camera for the first time is to confront the image anew, and elements often appear unnecessary to its main point. 

This set required a high camera angle; hence the step stool to be able to see the screen on the camera back for framing and focussing. I had to make it even higher since the table I use for shoots is raised. The reason for that is that the camera on that largest Manfrotto tripod with Manfrotto’s sturdiest geared head sits too high even at its lowest height for a straight horizontal shot if the table is not raised, and I often seek the intimacy of such a shot. 

The small silver side table holds the laptop I tether the camera to. 

As you can see, this set took five light sources. To bring a sense of spaciousness often requires lights dedicated to small highlights as well as to lighting specific portions of the set differently. If you look carefully you can see an array of homemade snoots attached to the lights. These lights are specifically engineered for miniature photography. The control box, with its brightness control dials, can be seen sitting on the silver chair in the background. 

The final image is also below. 

I worked for years with Lumecube lights. A fine product that is brilliant for many applications-- but which is not meant for miniatures. They are meant for larger, real-world scenes. They also have short battery life and tend to overheat. It could be quite maddening trying to get all the light sources to work at once, often only to have one or more die during an exposure. Balancing them was a tricky process of pressing buttons the right number of times to set a light level—then remembering the numbers of presses when they died and had to be allowed to cool down or be switched out. 

Therefore to meet these challenges I needed a new solution, and that solution is the lights pictured here. My good friend Steve Richard (Steverichard.com), a brilliant engineer as well as an extraordinary photographer, got interested in my difficulties and engineered and assembled a completely unique set of LED light sources, driven by a central power source and control box. Now I have stable illumination of even colour temperature that is designed to work at close quarters. It allows me to set precise light levels and have them remain fixed as I work with the scene, a complete game-changer for me.

The complexity of the lighting varies, but it is not unusual for me to use 5 or 6 light sources. Sometimes they are broadly diffused; sometimes the smallest, faint spot.  It is exceptionally difficult to work in a necessarily tiny space with so many lights. The stands are virtually on top of one another (and often competing for the camera’s line of view) and adjusting just one without jostling others is a major challenge. I employ the full panoply of techniques used for real world lighting –snoots, bounce, barn doors, diffusion, filters, etc. Because of the small scale some attachments, especially very long snoots, I wind up making myself. 

The central control box enables me to finely adjust all the light sources, then if necessary turn them all off with one switch and be able to start where I left off later on.  All the time lost working with LumeCubes is now avoided, and my attention is freed from worrying about lights to thinking of more consequential details for the image.

Shooting small scenes creates unusual requirements like, I suppose, other types of tabletop photography. Using a view camera allows close focussing and very narrow depth of field. As importantly, it allows me to use tilts and swings to play with focus and perspective to create a sense of scene as well as thematic emphases. I always shoot tethered to an Apple laptop, using Fujifilm’s new, and very good, Fujifilm Tether App.  

Even using a fair bit of light and shooting wide open, exposures are often measured in minutes rather than seconds, and then they take a long time for the GFX to process. I often shoot and re-shoot scores of times in an evening so it can become laborious and time-consuming.  Between each shot is a minuscule adjustment of pose, shadow, illumination or camera. 

Still, I love the feeling of working with an older camera, even if it is necessarily cluttered with the menu complexity and programmability of the GFX (which itself is a fine camera). 

The sunbathers worked the opposite way. I knew the image I wanted and spent a lot of time looking for g-scale figures in (or out) of bathing attire to use in the Zen garden (modelled after a famous one in Japan). In the end these ones seemed most suitable to fall under the watchful eye of the Buddha, and they had the advantage too of coming already painted, like their Schadenfreude kin.

My studio began to resemble a cheap confiserie as I assembled varieties of candy. But none of those looked right, either. Finally, a trip to a bulk food shop led to the discovery of mini M&Ms. I filled the grave with them, but their colourfulness, while an interesting effect, didn’t express the mood I was looking for. I had bought enough of those to be able to edit out all the colours other than brown, and that’s what I did. The image snapped into place, once enough of the brown mini M&Ms were carefully arranged into a mound and then moved so their little m would show. The brown candy also harmonized nicely with the larger grave mound, which is filled with dried coffee grounds. Both coffee grounds and candy are unruly when trying to make miniature mounds, and it took some time to arrange them to illustrate the grave shape I was striving for.

And now I have containers of numerous candies in my props storage. Surely those brilliantly colourful little pill-like shapes will be useful? Some context will appear to make jelly beans look like jelly beans? 

For now, I print them on 17x22” (43x56 cm.) Canon Premium Fine Art Smooth paper. It has the depth and richness that I’m looking for, and the size is a good one to draw the viewer in. The size is important with miniatures because it affects how we perceive the final image; are the characters smaller than life or larger? More or less real? How does being confronted with a large image—or a small one—change our perceptions of the expressiveness of these little characters? Immerse us more or less in their world? 

Once they are printed, they need to be framed. Originally, I framed them with mats showing a bit of white paper around the image—a standard photographic presentation, but not right. These are not, to me, “photographs”. I know that sounds odd, since they’re made using a camera. Other miniature photographers, most notably David Levinthal, have found a place in the photographic tradition—I was inspired by his terrific show at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY.  Yet, my images are not documents. They don’t use photography to explore the world. Even my little dioramas barely exist; looked at from any perspective other than the camera’s and the don’t look finished. They’re a sort of illusion compounded between camera and set. On the scale between pure photography and other, plastic arts like painting or sculpture, I think of them as somewhere in between, at a bit of a remove from photographic tradition.