More Behind the Scenes

A few weeks later, we were heading down the Icefields Parkway again. Most places were way too crowded with tourists to even consider taking doll photos, but the parking lot at Hilda Ridge was mostly empty....

So I set up the dolls and horses on the edge of the parking lot overlooking the valley, with the dolls facing into the sun....

Then I had to get down on a tarp on the gravel to take the photos....

Setting Up Camp

I had wanted to take some photos of the dolls in a campsite using my tents, but there had not been many opportunities. When we were staying in the Jasper Overflow Campground, which is a wide open area, with hardly anyone else there, it was way too windy the first evening. But the second evening was perfect, so I thought to set up a camp on the picnic table. I first covered the table with the tarp....

Then set up a scene for the epilogue, which only required one tent. ​

I started with a scene from the Epilogue, with Maya on a quest of his own, with only the eagle as his guide. I tried to make sure there were no picnic tables in the background coming out from behind a character so they'd be easier to get rid of later.

Now, a picnic table isn't very big, so I knew the tarp was going to show in photos, so I also took a photo of the gravel. That way I'd have a photo of the same kind of stones to paste into the edges of my photos later using Photoshop....

I was also not going to deal with real fires on our trip, and just used the fake fire from my castle fireplace for the photos.  Then once we got home I tried to take some photos of twigs burning in our backyard fireplace....but it wasn't very successful...

Then a week later, we went up to our son's cottage for a visit, and he always has a big fire burning, so I took lots of photos.  I took photos close up and at a distance so I'd have a selection of real in-scale flames to Photoshop over the fake fires in the story photos depending on if the photos had a close up fire, or it was more in the distance....

So here's the final photo, with the gravel and flames added, and all the background picnic tables removed...

Then I was inspired to shoot the KFC scene with the dragons...

And finally the scene with Narin and Adrian setting up (or taking down) a tent....

Then in post production with the gravel added in the foreground...