Miniature photography necessitates familiarity with sources of little figures and miniature furnishings and the like. I've spent uncountable hours browsing through architectural modelling catalogues and listings of dollhouse and model railroad materials, not to mention actual doll and toy stores and hobby marts galore. You never know when inspiration will strike (mostly it doesn't though... I've got cabinets full of a myriad miniature things that may never find a place in a photograph, however taken with them I might have been when I acquired them). Sometimes a pre-existing figure can be quite suggestive, as was the case with the figures in the picture below. These figures were sold as a pair named Schadenfreude in the model railroad catalogue I found them in (yes, model railroaders appear to be interested in the weirdest figures; the sunbathers in the Zen Garden, also below, were also from this little figure company, the German firm Preiser ). As soon as I saw them I felt I would find a way to use them, and after maybe a year or so I toying with the idea I bought them (even these little plastic pieces are expensive) and planned the image you see which also involved confit egg yolk.

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.