The whole story must have taken you hours setting it up and photographing it,let alone the time in planning it all. Many, many thanks for taking the time to do all this and share your work with us.
Hm, not as many hours as I thought first. Making the photos and the setup does only take a few hours which I distributed over two days, and anyway it was a lot of fun (I should do more of this stuff). But truly saying I was thinking about the story itself for several weeks, so planning took quite a while, but this has been no explicit time but was an "ongoing" task done during showering, teeth cleaning or driving on the autobahn
. However in the end I have taken much more pics than originally planned (I was thinking of about 5-7).
Most work was building up the stage, not only for this purpose but hopefully also for future photo shootings. With this "permanently" installed stage I hope that I can provide photos and stories much fast than in the past. I've found a little corner in our house (in the basement, or to be concrete in the heating room
) where I can install this little stage without "disturbing" my wife too much
The stage is built from pressboard; the lawn lays lose on the floor board to be exchanged for other ground materials. The sky is fixed with permanent spray glue to the backdrop board. It's exchangeable so that I can use different backgrounds (at the right hand side of the referenced photo below you can see another background scenery). On my standard sky I finally added some hill silhouettes, because my wife always criticizes, that my standard flat horizon without any landscape rise doesn't look very natural -- and she was absolutely right. I also installed two neon tubes with natural light (from the aquarium supplies) for the lightning. Although I'm still not satisfied 100% with the light, it has become much better than every other light source I used so far; it can be seen quite good in the historgramm of my painting software that this light uses nearly the whole color spectrum of the natural (sun) light.
I hope I do not spoil the story when I provide
here a photo which has been shot from "a few steps backwards" to show the setup . For those who do not want to see it: don't klick the link
... for those who are interested in HOWTOs -- like myself
-- take a look. (Somehow the shine suddenly vanishs not looking thru the lense anymore, but on the surroundings
)
Also bigger efforts have been preparing the bi-lingual "slideshow" PHP scripts (I implemented it by my own) and scaling/cropping the photos together with captioning them. Especially the last mentioned task took even longer than I expected.
