The setup for the "Unquiet Dead" episode-themed photo was weirder than usual to see without proper lighting and camera angle, and I took a couple of pics of it this time for fun.

All but a couple of my photos include the floor or ground, because I like the realism of seeing the figures with their feet on the ground and getting the sense of a real location. Here, however, including the snowy ground wasn't going to work the way I would have wanted given the photo of the exterior of Sneed's that I wanted to use.

So to get the figures to be in the right place relative to the printed backdrop, you can see that I just grabbed whatever was around--DVD and PS3 cases, a stack of drinks coasters, whatever worked to get the right height for each element.

Here's how hilariously rubbish it all looks "for real":

The photo taken of the Sneed's location is divided into left and right halves and then printed on two letter-sized pieces of high-quality matte photo paper, in portrait orientation. This gave me the right size of backdrop to use relative to the 5" scale figures. These are mounted side-by-side with tape on stiff black posterboard. Black and other dark colors are best for things like background mounting because light tends to bounce around all over the place when taking these pics, and the more of your staging infrastructure that's black, the more precise control you can exercise over the lighting. A useful tip right there.

The three lights used can be seen in these pics. In the one above, on the left we have the main incandescent lamp, which you can see is on a box on a stool in order to get the right height. Also, you can see a piece of ordinary printer paper taped across it. That's an easy and cheap way to soften the intensity of a light you're using when you need to. The paper functions not unlike certain filters used by professional lighting designers, but much easier to get your hands on and use! Also, you can see a white dimmer switch attached to that lamp. Getting one of these inexpensive dimmers is highly recommended for taking toy photos. As you can see, that light was used to shine directly at the gaslamp in the background photo, making it appear to glow like real flame and making it the brightest element, as it should be.

Now, here's a closer shot of the staging from a different angle:

The printed background is leaning crooked in the above pic, but it was straight when taking the actual picture, of course. On the table the other two lights used can also be seen to the right of the staging. The right-most blue one is a small incandescent flashlight, with promotional printing on it (for "The Chicago Sun", actually.) Most of the small lights we use are actually free "swag" and novelty flashlights of this kind that my girlfriend and I pick up for free wherever. We've got around 20 of them now to use for photos depending on what we need. This one has a neat pivoting tip which can be used to turn the light at different angles and is pretty bright. This was used to light Gelth Zombie Grandma from the back, which creates the warm "highlights" on her shoulders that are suppsed to appear to be coming from the gaslamp.

To the left of that partly wrapped in tissue is the "blue" light we used to light the front of Gelth Zombie to give the contrasting "cold" look she has in the photo. Talk about a weird "novelty" light that we find works well for certain things--the damned thing is actually a butane lighter! It has a blue-ish LED pinpoint flashlight on one end activated by a button--presumably to use as "emergency" light or something. It turns out that it's the best blue-tinted LED small light we can find for certain things, go figure. The point of the tissue is similar to that of the paper used as a "filter" on the overhead lamp. It's just ordinary "Kleenex" tissue, so you've already got it somewhere in the house and it works very well as a filter when a light you're using is too intense. Just hold the tissue paper over the light--using one, two, or more sheets to give different degrees of dimming and filtering. Another useful tip.

Ok, so here's the final Unquiet Dead photo posted again to easily compare it to the pics of the staging.

The camera was simply positioned at the correct angle in front of what you see in the pics above, all other lights in the room turned off except the three being used for the photo, and the picture taken after setting the focus to make Gelth Zombie clear in the foreground, and the background including Nine and the TARDIS more blurry. After the first test photos, we saw that there was too much light getting to the right-hand side of the photo backdrop, and the lower part of Grandma Gelth. So, we each held pieces of black card strategically in front of the lights to block it from reaching those areas. This is a last-resort measure you can take when your lighting isn't as precise as you'd like. I wish someone could have taken a photo of my girl and I contorted into strange postures to try to hold the lights, hold the black cards, and operate the camera all at once, 'cause that would look hilarious, I'm sure. That's why it's best to avoid having to do that. But, you know, the things we do in the name of art and all that . . .

CJ