Behind Scenes - Fav Photos 2021

Behind the Scenes

Taking a look at the set-ups for some of my photo shoots this year - when I remembered to take them
In the order they were taken...

New Shoes

I was in the process of making five pairs of fancy shoes for my FID ladies, and thought I'd take advantage and turn it into a story. I set up a shoe maker's shop, much like the Old Curiosity Shoppe from 2020, except it was filled with shoe making supplies. I thought I had finished shooting the story, and had already taken the set apart, when Jan gave me another idea. So I had to set it all back up. But I only did the part of the shop that would be used for the photos....

The scene looked very nice with the sun shining in....

Same with the castle interior. I had the table pushed up close to the window just so the light would come in the window....

Two in One

While working on two totally unrelated themes for a few weeks, I had to get creative with my background setting. The castle was set up on the dining room table, but I needed Muffy's seamstress shop as well. So I just set it up in one side of the castle room.....

...leaving the other half for the chain mail series....

Two completely unrelated characters sharing the same space...

A Flower Shoppe

I had a castle room all set up for my next photo shoot - Monica's birthday - and was putting together some extra flower arrangements using my vast collection of tiny flowers...

Then Jan asked where they would be getting flowers this time of year with nothing blooming outside yet. And it wasn't like they could order flowers from far off lands and have them express delivered while the flowers were still in their prime.

Which gave me an idea. So I raided the doll's china cabinet for every porcelain vase in there, and gathered every container off my prop shelves that could hold flowers, and a few hours later, after emptying out the castle, I had an entire flower shop set up on my dining room table....right in the middle of the castle set again....

By the time I was finished, the sun was shining in on the scene, and it was too late to take any doll photos for that day. But it made the shop look so nice all on it's own....

There's even some real plants in there, including my miniature palms and cyclamen...

...and the shoppe was ready to receive an unusual customer...

Winston and the Flowers

I had to get creative so Winston would actually be able to carry all the flower arrangements as he was leaving the shop. After all, he's just a very lightweight cloth dragon, and certainly wasn't capable of actually carrying anything that wasn't as light as he was. And those fancy flower arrangements were quite heavy.

So I used two of my small size doll stands, one to hold up each arrangement. The basket of flowers was also supported by one of the doll stands. Winston actually only carried the two lightweight bouquets.....

Then I took my photos cropped in so the stands wouldn't show....

or took them from an angle where the stands were mostly hidden.

Out on the Road

We were out shooting scenes for 'Map Reading Day', but it was very windy, so Jan had to keep fixing the map each time it started blowing away...

My back pain was really acting up, so I thought I'd try taking a photo just sitting on the ground...

...but then the dolls weren't low enough against the 'horizon' for forced perspective to work, so they still looked like 'dolls'. So I had to get even lower, and lie down, so the entire set up would be higher against the background, with Owen's head well above the horizon....

Monica's Birthday

The first scenes on the morning of her birthday were meant to be in the royal couple's private room, so I put together a less formal room in the castle, with the table pushed up against the dining room window. It was a dark gloomy day, so I had to supplement the lighting with a studio spot light...

Then for the party scenes, I needed a wider setting with the table rotated widthwise across the room. The chandelier was in the way and I kept hitting my head, so Jan raised it out of the way, right up to the ceiling.

I always set up the scene so there's several different things going on. The photos of these castle rooms tend to get very dark at the back, and over-exposed at the front, and it helps if I light the candles along the back wall....

Then I take photos of the individual scenes....

....from several different angles....

Once I'm finished taking photos of that scene, I'll move everyone around into new poses....

...so there's several new things going on to take photos of....

Fairies in the Scillas

One evening we took some dolls to the Scilla field for some photos. It was a partly cloudy evening, with the sun shining down on the dolls now and then. It proved rather challenging since the sun was coming in low from one side, and I'd have to wait for a cloud to obscure it in order to take a photo. So I thought I'd take photos of the exact same scene in the different lighting conditions.

First with hazy sun coming from the side....

Then using a flash to get rid of the harsh shadows....

And finally after some clouds blocked the sun...which is my favourite kind of lighting....

Bicycle Day

Bicycle Day was on April 19th, but it took ten days before I could actually take a photo. We did take them out several times, but it was never the right weather, always too cold, too sunny, too rainy, or too windy. Then the place closest to home had all new 'No Parking' signs along all the streets, and my 'go to' road in the country had a pile of dirt on one end, and ugly black construction fences on the other, so we had to find someplace new.

We finally found a chained off driveway to a boarded up, expropriated, century house, in the middle of all the new subdivision construction devastation. The sign said 'No Trespassing', but we ducked under the chain so Owen and Leona's family could finally have their little bike ride...

Then I got down on the ground to shoot at the doll's eye level....

Benny's House

I needed an interior home setting for Benny for a Mother's Day photo shoot, and had never shown her home before, so put together a room using a variety of different furniture and props, on the end of my dining room table....

....with no background walls.... just letting the hallway and stairs to the basement serve as background....

Ladies in the Garden

My garden isn't the best place to pose scenes with my dolls, other than first thing in the spring when the plants are still very short. There's also not much in the way of interesting background - there's an ugly fence visible everywhere - so I positioned a big tree root in the garden, and draped an indoor ivy all over it, to help give the impression that the ladies were sitting in a lush garden. Then I zoomed in to just the two ladies....

The scene from a bit further back...

And the same spot in the garden a few weeks later when the plants had grown way too tall to use for photos....

Biking to Work

For 'Bike to Work Day' I had wanted to take a photo of Owen biking in a city setting, as opposed to always out in the country. So I made him a safety vest so he'd stand out in busy traffic.

We went out on several occasions, driving around town looking for a good place to take the photos. There was no way I wanted to get down on the ground in a public space, so I was looking for something raised. There were utility boxes at the mall, but they were just a bit too high. It was also way too windy, and I was afraid Owen would blow over.

So we finally ended up at the town hall, where there's raised flower boxes with wide enough edges to serve as 'sidewalks'....

If I shot the photos from the other side of the wall, I could get the park and the street in the background....

Miho in the Crabapples

At the nearby high school there's three pink crabapple trees growing between the driveway and the sidewalk. They are very low and wide, so the blossoms are easily accessible for hand-held photos of dolls every spring. I'd already been there once in mid day for photos of some other dolls. So for something a little different, we went the second time in the evening when the sun was low, to take some 'fashion shoots' of Miho with her fairy wings....

I tried to position her so I could get some shots with the sun shining through her wings from the back....

Pizza Party Day

For National pizza Party day I set up the scene on my backyard patio table....

I had wanted the nice pink crabapple petals all over everything, but with the heat wave when the flowers bloomed, the petals turned a dark red instead. I had baskets of million bells for the background, but when it got really cold with chance of frost they all had to come into the house for a while, and they lost most of their flowers, so were just green bushes. I needed the white cardio bounce light into the doll's faces since I had the scene set up with their backs to the lightest sky.

A photo taken from a little overhead so we could see the pizza....

...and a close up taken at the doll's eye level....

Donut Day

I was so fed up with there not being any flowers yet in my million bells, that we went and bought another basket - full of pink and yellow flowers. I used it, as well as the pot with pansies for the background, setting them up on the patio table. I needed some kind of ground cover, and the chestnut tree was dropping all it's flowers, so I gathered up a bunch to sprinkle on the table...

I tried taking some photos showing the entire mushrooms, but wasn't happy with the results....

The best photos happened when I zoomed right in to take close ups...

Peanut Butter Cookie Day

Another set up on my kitchen counter....