If You're Interested Dept.

I thought I'd write up a quick 'tutorial' on how I photograph my toys. Overall, I do it in a pretty straightforward way:

I use my dining room chairs to shoot my toys against. They're brightly colored and curved, so they make great backdrops, as long as the toy isn't very tall. I'll use one of the white chairs or one of the orange ones, depending on the color of the toy.

I usually shoot in my living room early in the morning (between 6 and 10 AM) to use as much natural sunlight as possible. I think the main windows face north, so depending on the time of year, I'll get plenty of light streaming in.

Since the seats of the chairs are curved, sometimes I'll put a sheet of foam core across it if I want to shoot multiple items. One toy might sit at a skewed angle, but I can usually compensate with the camera's angle. If the toy is too big to shoot in a chair, I'll plop the foam core on a stack of plastic tubs and shoot against a wall.

I use a Olympus Camedia C-3040 Zoom (3.3 megapixels). If you actually go to the trouble to get one of these cameras (it's five years old or more), be sure it has a memory card with it - they don't make the cards anymore, and to get one by itself would cost over a hundred dollars.

Ninety percent of the time, I use the macro setting (that's the flower icon on this particular camera), and auto focus (I think that's the default setting) with no flash. If the toy needs a longer depth of field (like a toy car), I'll use the manual focus. If it's the white backdrop, I'll aim the setup into the sun, keeping the whole thing out of full-blast sunlight, but not setting up in the shadows, either. If it's the orange backdrop, I'll aim it all against the sun - the light usually comes over the top of the chair at that time of day and gives me a nice rim-lit effect without washing out the toy or the background. If it's a small object, the orange will drop down to a nice, rich orange color. Using a higher camera angle and tilting down can help improve this effect.

I'll shoot ten or twenty pictures of each toy until I get the angle that I want - sometimes I have to 'find it'. If I'm worried that the auto-focus isn't cutting it, I'll shoot from a variety of distances to cover myself. Then I'll connect the card to my Mac and dump the shots into iPhoto. I'll pick my favorite and use the 'Adjust' tool to do some rudimentary tweaking - this usually involves sharpening, cropping, straightening and brightening the shot, since I don't use flash (I think the light from a flash looks unnatural most of the time).

Once I'm happy, I'll drag it onto my desktop and do the more serious fiddling in Photoshop, since it's a more powerful tool. That can involve separating the whole bg as its own layer, and assembling bits and pieces of multiple copies of it together, in case the natural color ramping isn't working the way that I want. Hue, saturation, contrast, paint flaws (clone paint is your friend) - it's all up for grabs. I have no problem with making the photo look better than the toy, but I try not to go overboard - sometimes I'm successful with that, sometimes not!

And that's it! I post them to Flickr and go on to the next toy. I have gone on to do a second or third shoot with a toy, or a second pass through Photoshop, but for the most part, I've got enough un-shot toys ahead of me that I try to keep moving forward.

Hope that was informative - let me know if you have any questions!