Just like many child Christmas and Halloween are two of my favourite American holidays and I celebrate them by clicking some theme toy photos using my action figures, miniature accessories and dioramas pieces to enhance the photos. This year is no different and I been adding up some props (some I made myself) to go with the action figures as I started making dioramas and props since last year. The main character for this year’s Halloween toy photoshoot is McFarlane Batman (Dark Nights: Death Metal) and the theme is “Night at Graveyard”.
This year there were so many thing happening and I was in a hurry so I totally forgot to click the BTS (Behind The Scene) but I had that captured in a video and posted as a BTS reel, so if you are curious to know how I set up the scene, take a look (www.instagram.com/reel). I also used my trusty old Nikon D3100 DSLR with 55-200mm telephoto lens for background compression and proper framing. The photo above is raw photo (exported as Jpeg) that came out of camera, which is pretty impressive I must say.
But shot has gotten a bit too dark and I wanted some details to show up… so I did some correction in Nikon NX photo editor and it pull out lot of detail like the details on the bricks, his jacket is cleaner too. All I have to do to make it Instagram worthy is to crop it to 5:4.
I always do some post processing in Photoshop to make some details pop a bit more and add some effects, this time I added some fog. I also cropped the photo to 5:4 aspect ration, added my watermark and signed it off.
I clicked over 75 pics before I called it a day, so decided to upload more than one photo with a slightly different vibe, so I processed one more photo to go into Instagram repository and also processed one in Landscape for this post. I personally like the 4:6 aspect ratio as they show up more of the scene and looks a bit cinematic.
Overall, I had fun clicking these photos and processing them to my liking. The props and the setup and the lighting always challenges me and they just gets better and better. I totally loved this setup and the custom made diorama walls and tombstones made it super realistic. Now I have started my ground work for Christmas and Thanksgiving if time permits… till then… Ciao.
