Courne Supremacy

I’m by no means any expert at photography, but it’s fun to play with. Shooting small things and toys are cool.

I showed you my lego photo box before. This time I borrowed a macro-lens from a friend. It’s a Minolta lens which fits into the Sony A-mount. It does 28-85mm, but I only cared about the macro mode. There wasn’t any autofocus with the macro, so I just had to focus it myself, but I think the photos came out pretty well. Here’s a look at my setup — it’s the same as last time — a lego frame and then white paper for the sides and backdrop. Something that’s not pictured here is an aluminium foil reflector I created out of a piece of comic book bristol board and crumpled foil. Since I’m incredibly lazy the lamp just shines a top down light onto the toy. Alright it’s not really due to laziness. I played around with the light’s orientation and I didn’t like any of the cast shadows. I wanted the shadows to be right under the toy and if I did that I needed to bounce light back up to illuminate the toy further or there would be some hard shadows.  There’s still a lot of post-processing done on my computer to adjust the exposure and the black levels of each photo. I just moved the sliders until I felt happy with it and wham, bam, done.

I wanted it to look overexposed and very white and bright. I like that look a lot.

I’m exercising my Otakuness these days. I’ve got a bunch of new figures I want to purchase and adorn my house with — all of them are K-ON! figures. Alter released these figures of Mio, Yui, and Azusa, and I’ve ordered them. No idea when they’ll come in though since the dates are all further out, but I figure it’ll be like a nice surprise later on.

The setup in picture form:

First up Haruhi. The first image is ‘shopped from three images I took. I’m no expert in photo-manipulation, which puts me on par with everyone else who sucks at photoshopping images.

I recently got the Galaxy Express 999 figures. So here they are again. I tried some different shooting techniques with these figures. The upshot of Maetel and Tetsuro I achieved by laying them down on the “infinite white paper. I then held Tetsuro about level with her and as straight as I could and shot them together. I played with DOF with some of these photos as well and since GE999 is generally pretty (melo)dramatic, I thought it would add a nice touch to the toys.

Symbols for Ladies Chinenesis, Gigantea, and Foetida (just a warning, this image is fakkin’ huge):

No set is complete without Albino Grimby sitting on top of Kasumi.

That concludes my anime toy shoot for the time being.

Tags: albino grimby, Galaxy Express 999, Haruhi Suzumiya, kasumi, maria-sama ga miteru, Photography, sony a200, white box

I could buy a photo whitebox. I think the cheapest is 50 bucks. I saw the DIY on how to make a white box from a cardboard box, but I don’t have a spare one laying around that I’m not using for some kind of storage. So, while I was watching Moribito: Guardian of the Sacred Spirit, I decided to see if I could put one together with my oldest and favorite childhood toys: my Legos. It turned out that I did have enough Legos to build a framework to hang sheets of white sketching paper.

Here’s the breakdown: the floor of the whitebox is made out of two Lego town road plates put side by side. The framework is made out of blocks and they’re each about 37 Lego blocks high and they’re 2×4 peg towers. There’s three cross beams for the sides and the back. From these I fashioned white walls out of my 14×17 in. Biggie Sketchbook paper. The backdrop is an 18×24 in. sheet of sketch paper. I only have one light source here, which is an overhead lamp. The whole thing sits on my drawing table — which I’ve leveled — for the time being I haven’t been using my drawing table for any kind of actual drawing, so it’s a good work area for this setup.

That’s it.

I fashioned this so I could take some better pictures of my newly purchased anime PVC figures. I’ve been watching a boatload of anime — it’s a phase I’m going through right now. I started with Japanese Dramas such as Producing Nobuta, Densha Otoko, and Beautiful Life, and once went on back to anime sometime back in October.

One of the shows I finished off last year was Galaxy Express 999. I’ve posted about my obsession with this show in the past. I learned about it back in 2008 or 2007 after watching Kino’s Journey and fell in love with the show then. It was being fansubbed — imagine that, after 20+ years it’s finally being fansubbed, and then all of sudden it was dropped because Toei was going to do the translation. It took a while but eventually the entire series showed up on Crunchyroll.com and I was able to watch it all — for free. You can see it there too. I can’t recommend every episode. Some stories are plain out silly and the show’s animation definitely hasn’t aged well, but that’s all apart of its (creepy) charm. It’s also very melancholic and tragic, but I eat that stuff up. I got myself PVC figures for Maetel, Emeraldas, Tetsuro, and Tochiro.  They’re cheap since no one gives a rats ass about them anymore. Some photos from my flickr account reposted here:

I have a few other PVC figures so I’ll eventually get around to shooting them too. It might be cool to get a macro lens and go in really close. It might also be really cool to get a better light setup.

Tags: Galaxy Express 999, photo white box

I’m a big fan of Galaxy Express 999. I heard about it after watching Kino’s Journey, which is also an excellent anime, that is if you’re into the journeying, wandering, somewhat philosophical type of anime. It’s not for everyone. Wikipedia recommended Galaxy Express 999 if I really liked Kino’s Journey. Live-Evil is currently fan subbing it. Believe me, I’d buy the series if some half-way decent American anime publishing house would put out the 113 episode television series, but seeing how the show is from 1978 and we live in America where most anime ends in the word “-mon” that’s probably never going to happen. It would probably also cost me a small fortune to purchase all 113 episodes. I showed my fandom in other ways by purchasing the Viz graphic novels that were released about 6 years ago (so I got them all used) and I’m currently trying to get my grubby freakishly large hands on the original 18 volumes written in gibberish, I mean, Japanese. It’s all the same to me. Even half of English is like that.

The photo above is of Tetsuro and Maetel from the Galaxy Express 999 movie. It’s my favorite scene in the movie as illustrated by the statue. Maetel also gives Tetsuro a great speech in the end which I won’t ruin for you, but it has to make you wonder, “just who is/where is my Maetel?” It’ll make more sense if you watch the movie, which you should. The photo is also of a toy statue that my friend Genevieve or “The Wuffles” got for me during her trip to Japan. I was actually pretty blown away that she got me this, because I had seen the statue on eBay and other anime toy sites and thought to myself, “If there was one Galaxy Express statue I’d want, that would be that one.” Somehow she read my mind. She got me some other great Galaxy Express movie/art books that have enough pictures that I don’t have to worry about reading them. If I were more of a fanboy I’d probably be cackling in glee.

I finally brought this statue home from work today where its been adorning the side of my dust covered desk. I wanted to photograph it. I figured I should also try and do a decent job of it too instead of the half-baked shaky cam affair that is my standard. I wanted to try putting together a small studio environment so I could shoot it with a matte background and some decent lighting. Here’s what I did. Using two 18in. x 24in. pieces of paper, a chair, and an arm lamp that I can hang off anything, a tripod, and my trusty Canon A80 digital camera, I put this setup together:

Nothing elaborate going on here. I don’t have filters to disperse the light. Tape is holding the paper to the chair back rest and seat, and I actually did use Galaxy Express 999 mangas to prop the statue higher for a better shooting position. I’d want to say I did a bit more of a professional job shooting the toy, but honestly, the word “professional” would be giving me too much credit. I’m an idiot with a camera and I tend to shoot from the hip — like what I try to do with the sniper rifle in Halo 3, and like Halo 3 I manage to shoot everything other than what I want. One upside to this is that a 14 year old doesn’t come and teabag my corpse if I foul up. I’ll give myself this though: it’s slightly cleverer than not setting up the makeshift studio.

Once I had things going I used the MF scale on my camera to really get the focus set properly on the model. When you look at the images you’ll see lots of dents, scratches, and divets, but I love ‘em. It’s crystal clear. You can see every little bit of dust, debris, and detail.

Here are some more photos of Maetel and Tetsuro:

If you want to see the entire photoset from my shoot you can go to Flickr and take a looksee. You can also see all the picturs in their super high-res glory.

So there you have it. A simple makeshift studio. Maybe I can play around with using tin foil as reflectors and get some rim lighting going in here. That would be something nice. Then maybe I can upgrade myself from being “slightly clever” to a full on “clever.”

Tags: galaxy express 999 photography