Here’s another shot I took of the Laputa robot soldier music box a while ago that I shared on Instagram. I decided to go the black & white approach because I find the moss green colour on the figure to be pretty unpleasant. However, removing the colour from the shot made the flower in the hand hard to notice, hence the selective red colour to bring it out.
I like this shot quite a bit because it brings out the figure’s rough surface texture. This Laputa music box is by no means of the same quality as a scaled bishoujo figure, but I think this is a striking presentation of an otherwise plain subject.
This shot was a simple one-flash setup. Flash with a soft box on the left side, and a foam board reflector on the right. To achieve the blackout background affect, there’s only two things you need to do.
- Use the flash sync shutter speed (1/250 second for most consumer cameras), the minimum ISO setting, and shrink the aperture until all ambient light is eliminated.
- Blast your subject with flash, adjust power is required.
Of course, the dimmer the ambient light, the easier it is to achieve this. Placing the light sources as close as possible to the subject also helps, as well as steering clear of reflective surfaces in the background. All this is pretty easily accomplish indoors though, so give it a try if you got an off-camera flash.
I also went back to re-edited the outdoors shot I took last year. I de-saturated the cololurs because I felt the green and the contrast was too much. Instead , I went for a slightly orangey faded look that’s supposed to give it an antiquated feel. This is a departure from how I usually edit my photos, so I really don’t know if this looks any better than the original — you be the judge!
