Behind the scenes
Below is a picture of my studio. The subject, lights and camera are set up. This particular scene took a while to make. I had to build a foam base and make it appear to be covered with grass. Graves had to be dug and filled and fitted with suitable headstones And (finding, or making, tiny headstones was not as easy as I would have liked it to be). A suitable backdrop of trees and shrubs was poked into the Styrofoam base. It doesn’t look like much on the table: the illusion only comes together in the camera.
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.
