Ok, it's one of the "episode-themed" photos, and still going more-or-less in episode order "Girl In The Fireplace" was next up:

It's now a staple of my pics that I tightly focus bright lights on parts of the printed background in which something is supposed to be a light source--lamps, windows, etc.--using the whiteness of the paper to reflect it and add realism.

So, here the obvious challenge was dealing with the fireplace. If these photos are to capture the essential elements and themes of an episode, I'd better have the eponymous Fireplace in this one or it's just not on! Problem is the rest of the ship in the episode is lit dark and moodily, so controlling the spotlight on the fire while keeping it from straying elsewhere was . . . challenging.

Doing this makes the fireplace come off much better than in my 12" Clockwork Man portrait-style photo from a couple years back, before I'd mastered that technique.

Here are two 'detail' croppings for those who want to see bits of it larger:

Also, here's my old 12" Clockwork Man portrait photo from waaaaay back, to compare the fireplace treatment. As you can see the fire is just not as convincing as in the new full episode pic:

The disappointing fireplace is what I didn't want a repeat of this time around. This older one was supposed to be set in France, not the spaceship, so things are brighter overall. I suppose if I didn't feel I've gotten better at these after two years or so I'd be worried! I do like looking at this old pic still, though, just 'cause I think the 12" Clockwork Man toy is fantastic. Lovely detail and stitching, etc.

Now the Fireplace was a real prop in the episode, so my weird sense of "integrity" for these photos requires that mine either has to be a miniature prop, or a printed background element shot live on the "set". It's still the case that my self-imposed restriction to keep myself challenged is that no Photoshop compositing or special light effects or the like is "allowed", unless there's an element that might be CGI or an SFX in the episodes and couldn't be achieved any other way. (Joint-removal where needed and light "touch-ups" of the ordinary variety a photographer would use like removing speckles, some selective blurring, etc are "ok" too.) Just to re-explain why I sometimes use techniques that might seem not as . . . efficient as others might be.

So, here I'm just using good old-fashioned 2-D forced perspective along with the spotlight technique I described upthread to make the fire appear to glow. In other words, the set isn't as deep as it appears--the actual floor ends where the tiled section in front of the fireplace begins, and everything from the edge of the tiled flooring on up is actually a vertical flat. (Unlike the older Clockwork Man portrait where the tiled flooring is actually flat on the ground because the background that came with the 12" toy had a fold where the floor meets the wall. Hope that makes sense.) Gotta love forced perspective!

Here's one pic that shows the setup, and I always love the way how totally rubbish everything appears when you take away the lighting, angle and proper camera settings.

And another from a different angle:

You can see in those pics that the background consists of:

- The large printed inside of the packaging for one of the 12" R/C Daleks, which I believe is trying to be Van Statten's Dalek torture room, turned upside down. (How random is that?) This serves as the main bulk of the backdrop. Nice gray walls with some texture, not unlike the walls of the ship in the episode. Also, I'm using the surface of my trusty coffee table for the floor, a table I keep solely for the fact that the surface texture is perfect for so many of these pics and can really be made to look different with different lighting to suit a given purpose.
- A color print-out of a cropped screenshot of the Fireplace and surrounding wall/floor from the set in the episode--I believe it's captured from the Confidential where there was a good shot of the empty set. It's just placed, not even fixed in place but leaning freely, against the middle panel of the Dalek toy packaging. (Again, delightfully cheap and rubbish technique, but it works.)
- Various items that in scale look like random space junk machinery as was littered about the place in the episode. There's some fiber optic wire to look like thick electrical cabling, what I believe is a small toy Apollo space capsule laying on its side (on the floor between Rose and Black-coated Clockwork Man), some robotic arms off some toy or other (right of the pic), a volume knob that fell off my bass guitar, and the large-looking piece of machinery with cables next to Rose is actually a discarded rear-projection lightbulb affair from a large HD TV set. Can you tell I enjoy the randomness involved in set-building sometimes? Random collection of discarded crap become effective props.

. . And now onto the lighting . . .

Three light sources were used:

- a lightly blue-tinted incandescent bulb in a desk lamp with a dimmer for the overhead lighting,
- a small bright LED clip-on light to make the fire appear to glow,
- a couple of subtle incandescent miniature "footlights" with blue gel taped to them, to supplement front-lighting of the figures and help to tweak the lighting to better match that in the episode. (Those can be seen at the front of the set in the BTS pics in the prior post, along with their battery pack. These little babies have been useful in so many ways in my pics, sometimes actually appearing as props in-shot.)

As with most of my photos, except for those light sources the room was completely dark when taking the pic. That's so I can be in complete control of every little lumen!

The following two pics focus on the blue-tinted desklamp, and the small LED to make the fire glow, both affixed at the top of the set. I'll refer to them in the text that follows them:

What you're looking at there is the desk lamp with the blue-tinted bulb on a stool behind the set so it can be the main overhead light. Only you can't really see it, 'cause it's got paper wrapped around it. What's going on there is that often I need to fashion an improvised "cone" to keep the light going where I want and not straying everywhere. In this case, discarded printouts of the Fireplace that didn't come out right are simply wrapped around the desk lamp and attached with tape. Never waste anything! Then beneath it you see the small bright LED spotlight clipped to an all-purpose vice-grip . . . thingie which is in-turn clipped to the top of the back-panel of the set. Seems protracted, I know, but believe me it was the only way to have the spotlight held at the precise angle and distance it needed to be in order to make the fire in the printed backdrop appear to glow (and that glow then reflects and also becomes a light-source for other parts of the set--thus creating an organic integrity to what you're looking at and turning the "fire" into another light-source, just as it would in reality.) For this spotlight on the fire, as you can see the same necessity arose to fashion a "cone" from paper to keep it tightly focused on its subject. Yes, that is a picture of Donald Duck on that smaller cone--it's the stub of a Disneyland admission ticket. It's attached to the small LED light with cellotape, and does the job. And, I believe that's all there was to it! As usual, I'm just gonna repost the final pic here again at the end, so one can see the final result after knowing how it's all done:

Ok, hope that was interesting/useful to those who request the BTS stuff, and maybe you picked up some tips and techniques you can use in your own photos!