Baby, It's Cold Outside: time to think about taking pictures indoors again

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to take better pictures of the dolls.

This is more challenging than it sounds. Even with my experience as a photographer, the dolls are so little that it can be super-tricky to get them to sit a) in good lighting, b) at a level that I can actually shoot them at without putting my face on the ground, and c) in a pose that shows them off well. I had originally taken several pictures "photo-booth" style on a black background, with good flash and everything. This worked for some dolls, but others - such as the black mage and Heartless dolls, not to mention Darkrai and Umbreon - the results were less than stellar. Add to that the fact that my monitor always seems to show images much lighter than the rest of the world's monitors, for reasons which I still don't understand - and all too often, my photos have been underexposed and too shadowy.

So I've been taking the dolls outside. This isn't terribly interesting, because it's winter here in New England and we're in that in-between dead phase of "all the plant life is dead but the snow has not arrived yet", but it's at least bright, and we have lots of rock walls and winter-grasses that make a photo nice enough. I've even been able to get my 8-bit versions to help me out by holding some of the dolls. But what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in cold. I haven't been able to take photos of more than 4 or 5 dolls in a session because my hands freeze up after just a few minutes. That's been okay, because I've had to bring dolls with me to work and use a break period to shoot them, because it's only daylight during business hours.

Today, Mother Nature brought out the big guns.

When you're checking the world's weather reports from the comfort of your bed and looking out on a landscape that doesn't include any snow, it's hard to really appreciate what the actual temperature is going to be. So when you see (all temperatures in Celsius) that it's 2 degrees in Dublin, and 22 degrees in Buenos Aires, there's really no preparing for your local weather to read NEGATIVE SIXTEEN. That's right, it was almost below zero Fahrenheit when I woke up this morning. The high wasn't even going to reach the freezing point.

So, needless to say, my plan to take photos of my new Vincent plushie didn't quite go according to plan.

This weekend will be a busy one - we're getting our Christmas tree tonight (more on that next week), and tomorrow night we're having a fancy-dress holiday party at our home. Maybe on Sunday, if I'm alive to tell the tale, I'll be able to figure out some sort of indoor doll-photography solution.

-- Jenn