Reason #128,104 Why I Love Toy Photography — Storytelling
I’ve been a photographer for 50 years now. Well a serious photographer. I probably took my first photo more than 50 years ago, but when I was a teenager I started thinking that photography was going to be the most important thing in my life and I started really studying how to do it well.
What got me hooked so hard, so fast and so young? The prospect of being able to take one moment in time and use it to convey a story was intoxicating then and it still is now, 50 years later.
When I started photographing toys/action figures it dawned on me that I now had the ultimate platform as a story teller.
The kind of photography I am trying to do (occasionally with some success) completely revolves around the idea of taking a blank canvas and turning it into a photo. From nothing to something. I have an idea in my head and have to turn that into a photograph. That’s a big deal to me.
In the past, I reacted. If I saw something interesting, I photographed it. I might have gone looking for something and photographed it. But in those situations I am dependent on something else happening that I do not control.
Now, I control it all. I find the figures, make room for a set, build the set, position the figure in the set, build a background, place lights, choose camera angles, lenses, exposure, etc. Then I bring that photo from the camera to the computer where I finish it off according to my vision.
That is very powerful to me. To think that I can start from a place where there is nothing, and BAM — turn it into something — hopefully a story.
I’ll be the first to tell you that most of the time I fail. But once in a while, I get a result that I like. As I continue to practice I will get better and fail less often. For now, I am happy with the photo that accompanies this article. It’s an attempt to tell a story about a man and a baby in galaxy far, far away.
It’s a daunting task. I get one frame…one image — that’s it. I have to tell a story with just one visual. Motion picture directors get 24 frames per second over two hours to tell their stories. I get one frame.
Like I said, I usually fail. But I try to fail forward.
Today I am sharing an image where I think. . . I hope. . . I succeeded. It’s the Mandalorian and “the kid” also known as Grogu. Mando (as he is called) of Star Wars franchise fame is a hero. He’s a tough guy. He’s the new sheriff in town who doesn’t cow-tow to anyone. He’s hard as nails — until — he meets Grogu. And the little baby Jedi finds a way into Mando’s heart.
In this scene, even though we cannot see Mando’s face (it’s against the code to remove his helmet for anyone) we can infer a loving glance down at the baby who reciprocates as best an alien baby can.
Or not -
It’s up to you really. And that’s probably the BEST thing about storytelling in photography. Everyone can tell their own story — and there can be multiple versions of that story all stemming from the same photo. In this case, maybe you see something different than I do. That’s perfectly fine. If you looked long enough and hard enough to tell yourself ANY kind of story, that’s a win for us both.
For me, the whole process of coming up with a set (I took a photo of my stone driveway then printed it and made that the “floor” of the scene. I bought some fake sand that kids play with on Amazon and sprinkled that on the floor to add to the desert feel. I took a 3D rendering of a “space town” and printed that as a backdrop…) and then coming up with the lighting (I used a couple of smallish LED lights to light the scene…) coming up with a pose and putting the figure in that pose so that I could make the image…and finally — choosing a lens, camera, and exposure that would help me establish the mood.
After all that, it’s off to the computer. I finished it all in Photoshop and BorisFX Optics 2022 to give a nighttime feel. And all of that took me the better part of a day to accomplish.
I’ve condensed it quite a bit. But that is just a quick run down of what happened in my mind to get us to the final image.
I have no idea if this interests anyone but me, but I wanted to share it because I find it to be both fascinating and interesting — the whole process — the result — and especially the sharing of the result.
I do it in the hope that it brings a small smile to someone’s face — even one person’s face. If it does, it makes both of our lives better. And that’s a story worth telling.
Remember, toys are joy.
