For a project built on the premise that dolls can have adventures, the difficulty of taking great shots of dolls “in the wild” is a huge roadblock.
Either I use one of my studio shots (on the top) where I’m able to capture a sense of motion, and then merge it completely unartfully into the real landscape, or I get a shot realistically in the wild (on the bottom) that totally misses that sense of motion. I’m hampered by my inexperience as either a photographer or a photoshopper, and it’s really maddening. I’m inclined towards building my skill set in the former rather than the latter – after 8 hours a day on the computer at work, the last thing I want is to be fiddling with Photoshop in my spare time.
A meeting point in the middle might be to try something Elgin Park-like, where I build a realistic base (a path and some grass) and then set it up on a table in a real setting and use the real world as a backdrop for the miniature world.