Sharing a series of shots I took to illustrate the Underfoot episode I’m working on. The idea was that I’d follow two of the characters through their day, starting with a shower. I thought I’d take a picture of the rat character under the faucet (based on a very cube youtube video of a rat taking a shower in a sink.)

That idea flew at the window with my first shot. My sink it about 30 years old, and, wow, does it look it. There’s just no way to take a shot of it where you aren’t distracted by the ugliness of the sink and faucet itself. So, forget that. I decided instead to have them bathe in a cup full of soapy water.

I generally start by figuring out the placement and lighting before I add the characters, so here are bunch of shots of a cup full of soapy water.

First shot below. I like almost nothing about this shot – not the angle, not the lighting, nothing. Blah.

Next few shots looked like this. The different colors are different white balance settings on my camera. Nope, still hate them all.

Giving up on photographing in the kitchen (a north-facing room with fluorescent lighting) and moving by the window in the doll room instead. Much, much better lighting.

 

So, with my lighting finally fixed, I add a character. Nope, the rat just looks tiny from this angle.

So, I switch the angle and add Cosette to the shot. I knew before I started that I wasn’t actually going to put either of my BJDs in the soapy water, and that I was only going to photoshop the rat in. So, the original shot has to have both the soapy water and Cosette. I love the second one, so now I just have to figure out how I’m going to add the rat to the picture:

I take a few shots of the rat, both upright and on his back.

And then I try them out in Photoshop. Here are the two I didn’t choose:

Finally, I get the shot I want, and then tune up the lighting a little, and here’s my final shot:

Elapsed time was about an hour from start to finish. Lots of my session are much shorter, some are longer, but this is about average for a good shot. (Oddly, crappy shots either take much longer or much shorter than good shots. Longer if my initial idea is just not going to translate, and shorter if I’m in an easy-to-please day which I to edit in a more sound state of mind.)