September 4th, 2006
Toy Soldier Photography
Toy Soldiers, originally uploaded by LeggNet.
Yesterday’s post (link) featured a capture from a series I did photographing toy plastic soldiers (the cheap dimestore type) in various scenarios. I received a couple questions about the technique I used in creating the “look” of the shot, so here’s a brief rundown of how I did it:
First, I shot the soldiers at their eye level (or at least tried to get that low) and looked for natural items (pebbles, twigs & such) to include in the photo that would look like full size real-life features when enlarged. I also placed other items (soldiers, vehicles, etc.) in the blurred background to add depth to the scene.
Second, in Photoshop, the two main things I did to create the wartime look was to:
- Colorize the image using the Hue/Saturation tool (Hue: 43, Saturation: 15)
- Add an overlay layer created from a scanned image of real film grain
All of my other post-processing steps involved the normal steps one would take on an image (sharpening, brightness/contrast, etc.)
Pretty simple. Here’s a link to the complete set on Flickr: Toy Soldiers
LeggNet’s Digital Capture
© Rich Legg, Inc. All rights reserved.