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Playing with Fire

8/9/2017

 
I'm sure after my last post, many people were aghast that I would use real flames so close
to my dolls.  So I thought some 'behind the scenes' photos and explanations were in order.

First of all, I would never risking damaging my dolls, or causing some kind of out of control inferno. I carefully selected the doll's campsite to be on a huge flat spanse of granite - and swept off any debris that could possibly catch fire. Jan built the campfire out of stones he'd gathered from the gravel campground roads (and washed) and built the campfire using bits of birch bark and fallen branches.  I positioned my dolls around it in a wide semi-circle, so that they'd all be about a foot from the actual fire.  Then I got down flat on the rock with my camera....
Picture
Once I was down, I was too far back to reach anything to fix anything, and theres no way I was getting up again until I was done, so Jan had to adjust anyone's direction of gaze. Then I set my camera on 'multiple' consecutive shots to hopefully catch a nice set of flames, as such a small fire tends to burn out very fast.        And we were ready.   Jan lit the fire......and I started to shoot....

​The light breeze from the lake blew the flames to the right......and then to the left.....
Picture
Picture
Or, the breeze died and poor Ringo was totally obscured by the smoke....many times...
Picture
 ​The tiny fire would burn out rather quickly, so Jan rebuilt it several times.
​Several photos had flames that were way too big and out of scale to look believable....
Picture
And poor Ringo looked like he was about to be totally consumed by the fire....
Picture
In the end, I had 16 photos to work with, and chose one with a nice trail of smoke to one side,
​and Photoshopped some extra flames from other photos in in order to make a nice campfire, which was a simple enough thing to do, since all the photos started out the exact same size....
Picture
On hindsight, it might have been nice to have changed some of the doll's poses, but the
main focus on this series was to get a decent-looking campfire, and since there would likely
by Photoshop involved afterwards, all the photos I took needed to be as identical as possible.  
Plus with an open flame, that had to be the main focus of our attention.

The dolls did smell a little 'smoky' like a campfire, when we first cleaned up the scene, 
​but the smell had completely dissipated a few hours later.
Donna
8/9/2017 02:49:32 pm

I was wondering if the fire was real, knowing how attention to detail is very important to you... and real it is! Your pictures are so life-like as a result - they're wonderful!

Poor Ringo! He is too funny. Everything happens to him. You can count on at least a chuckle, if not a hearty laugh, in every photo he's in.

Martha
8/9/2017 03:21:24 pm

Of course the fire would be real. Although the final photo was made using the flames from some of the other photos. If you look closely you can see one of the flames from the 'smokey Ringo' picture was used in my final photo.

And Ringo was just unlucky. I didn't pay much attention to who was where, and so he ended up right behind the fire pit. But he has the perfect expression for everything that happened to him.

Jane
8/10/2017 04:50:02 pm

It never occurred to me that it wouldn't be real!
It was fun to hear how you achieved the final photo........and you answered the only question I actually had about the shoot. Did the dolls smell of camp-fire after the photoshoot! LOL!

Bravo! And another shining example of your wonderful attention to detail

Jill Jackson
8/22/2017 11:53:45 am

The smoke & fire definitely would have played to Ringo's facial expression. I love the lengths you go to in order to get the "money shot". It's the difference between a hobbyist and an artists. And, you have to have the best assistant ever created. :o)


Comments are closed.

    Author

    Martha Boers is an award-winning Canadian doll maker and costumer specializing in fantasy and historical-style costumes.
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