Behind the scenes: “Nature photography gone wrong”

Ideas, ideas, ideas

As many of you might know by now, my biggest problem is inspiration! I often need hours to even think of a feasible idea. Because of this, once i have an idea that might work, i don’t ditch it right away if the photo itself does not work.

The idea for this image

Being in Canada for work, I only had limited (plastic) resources and time to get some photography done. In the end I only created one image I liked (“Eye of the beholder“), but of course I shot a few more images that did not make it. Before I create a “rejected Lego photography“-post, I usually wait to see if the idea is still usable. This idea I tried in nature (under time-pressure), resulting in the images in figure 1 and 2.

In hindsight they weren’t too bad, but I didn’t like the light and for some reason the fact that I didn’t use the legs, did not feel right. Also the images looked out of focus to me. sadly, in the end I did not have the time to redo them.

Back home, the setup

Once home, I decided to recreate the image in my basement, and purely in a Lego environment. This way I could control the light better. The primary setup for this Lego photo can be seen in figure 1.

Figure 4 shows a close-up of the setup, showing you a few lights bringing out a few contrasts in the background. Also, it keeps the background from becoming too dark!

You can also see a few tiles on the left… this plate I used for another photo before; “the startled guard“.

Concluding

This time it is a pretty straightforward behind the scenes post. The main message is to give your ideas a second, or maybe even a third chance if the first image does not work.

Ultimately, I don’t know if I like the resulting image yet. The lighting is nice, but not really logical with the light coming in from the left versus the darker side on the right… I explained it as being dawn, but there’s something off. Anyway, it’s not a stunner… but it’ll have to do for now.