Here's another view from a slightly different angle.
Here's how to make your own
1. Buy lots and lots of Playmo (this is an easy one for everyone here)
2. Pick a vantage point you plan to shoot from and set up the scene so it looks good from that view. How it looks from other places doesn't matter for this kind of photo set. We tend to make complete scenes to allow photography from different angles. That's a great way to work, but to stretch out what you have to seem bigger a single vantage point works well. In this case I only used tree tops for most of the image, that was enough so making whole trees would have been wasted time and resources.
3. Put a band of the most detail up close and reduce the amount of detail the farther away from the camera it should be. In this case small plants with animals up close, large objects like the temple top in the midground and smaller looking objects like tree tops that could be any size at a distance.
You expect a volcano to be big so having it far enough away so it just fits in your image will make it seem bigger than it is.
4. Color gets lighter and more grey as it is farther away from you. I put a bright detailed foreground strip then the darkest tree tops I had in the middle section. A row of middle toned tree tops next then the lightest tree tops last. Doing it on a slope puts each group a little higher in the image.
5. Light, light, and more light. I had the curtains open but it was a cloudy day. My room lights are fluorescent with about 120 watts above the table area plus light bleeding in from other fixtures farther away. I put a 500 watt halogen floor lamp right next to the scene to bounce as much light as possible off the ceiling.
6. Use a tripod or solid surface with a time delay on your camera. This will allow you to get by with setting for less light and not have blurring from camera movement. Playmo generally holds still so it's a good subject for lower lighting.
The hardest shot in Martin's story was the jumping Ninja, we had to ask him to jump a bunch of times before we got a clear shot.
Here are links to two versions of the plain jungle photo that are free to use as computer wallpaper if you like. One is for regular monitor shapes and the other for widescreen. Small versions of the images are below. The links will take you to large versions desktop size.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71879015@N00/4242117165/sizes/o/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71879015@N00/4242112765/sizes/o/in/photostream/
