Awesome Toy Blog

This was one of the rate photo projects where I went from idea to finished photo in one evening.  To make that challenging; this was also one of the rare photo projects that heavily relied on my Photoshop skills.  My Avengers boxset from HasbroToyShop was delivered and I was immediately enamored with it!  I just loved the retro stylings of the figures and I was suddenly inspired to re-create the cover to Avengers #1.  I downloaded the cover; and took to removing the Avengers from it; leaving the header area and Loki in the foreground.  Below that were 3 layers of action figure photos taken in the light tent; with the figures isolated from the background – one for Wasp, one for Ant Man and one for Iron Man, Hulk and Thor.  The final layer was a solid grey layer where I had drawn lines for a floor and some sort of wall panel.

Wasp and Ant Man were the most problematic to photograph; I had placed a pin into each figure leaving them hanging from Croc Master’s hand.  Once photographed, I erased any sign of the pin in the photo.  All in all, it was a few hours work – the most time consuming was removing elements of the original cover; but I’m very pleased with the outcome.

Here at the AwesomeToyBlog HQ, I often get emails informing me of topics for the site; most are generic press releases and aren’t terribly interesting but occasionally I’ll get one that gets tagged for posting.  This evening I got an email from photographer Jeremy Schultz asking for some help spreading the work on his kickstarter.com project to publish a book of action figure photography.  Titled “Souls of Toys” the book features 80 images from 17 different toy lines ranging from the 1970s to 1990s, collected in a 9”x6” format.  The project is fully funded; but you still have the opportunity to support Jeremy and score a copy of the book for as little as a $25 donation.  I encourage everyone reading this post to head over to his kickstarter page and check it out! Check out Jeremy’s website for more details on this project and his photography.

This is the second of my photos from my Flagstaff camping trip; as I was going into the woods it was obvious to take along some Ewoks.  But this photo was problematic; I wanted to have Ewoks in the foreground and forest in the background.  Unfortunately, the sun was not working with me…eventually I got this shot which was a good compromise.  Some adjustment of exposure was necessary in photoshop and I do think the background is a little overexposed but all in all its the effect I wanted.

Over the weekend I took a quick camping trip up to Flagstaff, AZ; and I brought along my camera and a bag of toys.  Recently, during a Hastings on-line sale, I picked up two additional Earthshock Cybermen – so I was keen to photograph them together as a group.  I think I took nearly a dozen variants of this photograph, but this was the one that I loved.  I’ve done essentially no processing to this photo, save for just slightly tweaking the exposure darker.  Having photographed them just outside the fire-pit gave the ground the nice depth of color and the contrast against their silver suit.

Its been awhile since I’ve posted any new figure photography, largely since I haven’t taken anything particularly good lately.  Yesterday I grabbed my camera, Styre and his pod and headed out the door to the mountain just a few hundred feet from my house.  The good news was that this picture was pretty much right out of the camera, I did very little post-processing.  The bad news was that the sky was completely blown out and there was no editing I could do to bring it back.  I probably should have waited another 20 minutes before snapping the picture; but what can you do.  It’s still a good photo – now to plan the next one.

I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve posted a photo on the site, so here’s a new one from this past weekend.  NECA’s new Ghostface figure, with use of an extension tube on my camera I was able to get the great depth of field.  That’s one of my favorite photography toys; it really enables some great small scale pictures!

I should add that the figure is great too.

Its been awhile since I’ve posted any photography, but I finally got the camera out and played with my toys some.  What we have today is an Underground Toys Earthshock Cyberman photographed very tightly using an extension tube and a focal length of about 40 mm.  I’m pleased to say, the only post-processing done on this photo was correcting the white balance.

This is one of my earlier photos with some photoshoppery processing.  Thought the image came out pretty interesting.

Two images taken in Sedona, AZ, one with the TARDIS, one without.  The camera was held by a tripod.  I layered the TARDIS image over the non-TARDIS one in photoshop and adjusted the opacity of the TARDIS layer creating the materialization effect.  Finally, I added a lens flare where the TARDIS lamp would be.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a new photography post, largely because I haven’t been doing a lot of photography.  However, I did get a new toy…a 25 mm extender tube for my camera.  That cuts down the minimum focal distance dramatically, letting me take fantastic close-up images.  I’m really thrilled with the perspective these shots give, as its almost a new way to experience action figures.  Looking at this Iron Man Mark II figure, you can see how the jaw-line was completely mispainted; maybe using a mask from another figure.  In the future, you’ll see more shots like this.  Post your thoughts below in the comments section.

The final photo in my Flagstaff snow series.   No post-processing at all.  Loved taking this pictures and hope you enjoyed them!

Since it is a holiday today, I figured I’d take a break from the snow pictures (only one left). Happy Valentine’s Day!

One of my final two ‘snow’ photos taken during my trip to Flagstaff, a Dalek is on ‘arctic’ patrol. For this photo I did minimal editing. I photoshopped out a ‘seam’ from the Dalek and corrected the color.
One of the things that went right with this shoot was that there was so much snow, that the banks were quite high. It made it very easy to shoot the figures from eye level (or below). Shooting at these angles really helps hide that fact that you’re shooting something so small and when against just a relatively blank landscape, the idea of scale is lost a bit making the subject appear much larger.

Today’s snow photo is the last of the Star Wars series I took, and also has the most photoshoppery involved. The translucent Obi-Wan was created by making Obi-Wan his own layer and having him be mostly translucent. I also faked the background using the clone stamp tool. Finally I removed the spirit’s shadow, since a ghost shouldn’t have one. And then there was some color correction. This is far more work editing than I typically do on a photo, but I’m pleased with the results.

This continues my photos from Flagstaff, AZ. The picture was fairly straightforward, once I was able to get both the Wampa and the Taun-taun to stand for enough time to snap the photos. I have several angles, but I think this one is the most effective. Minimal photoshop work was done after the fact, just some color adjustment.