Sharing my steps to get a good shot of Rat and Cosette getting that first cup of coffee in the morning.
I start off with Rat alone, hanging onto a coffee pot. I’m dealing with that fluorescent kitchen light again, but the shot isn’t bad. As a side note, this little rat is absolutely fantastic at holding poses. I challenge any of my other dolls to hang onto a slippery coffee pot.
Although the shot is OK, I think it might be improved by bringing Cosette into it. So I take a bunch of shots of the two of them together. I’m sharing 3, but I took 16 total. The pose stays generally the same, I mostly change the lighting and the angle of the shot. None of these are the final one, but they’re not far off in terms of the pose and angle:
I end up with a shot I like, but I have a problem. Yep, no coffee in the coffee pot. I had had some crazy idea at the start of the shoot that I could just photoshop that coffee in. You’ll see in the next series of post how that goes:
So, I make a pot of coffee, but, of course, now the coffee pot is way too hot to put back on the counter, so I photograph it in the coffee maker:
You can probably already see a ton of the problems I’m about to run into. The angle is totally wrong, as is the background – I can’t simply merge these shots, Instead, I copy and paste just the bit of coffee in the pot into the photo I decided to use, and then I use the perspective warp to give it the right angle. This is about the most kludgy Photoshop I’ve done in a long time, but I’m tired and I declare it “good enough.”
Now, I want to get a shot of the two of them drinking coffee. I start off with just the rat drinking alone and then add in Cosette. I’ll share 3 of the 10 shots I took:
I pretty much love all of these shots – I just took 10 because I wanted to give her a tiny cup to hold and put it at the right angle. In the end, I choose one of the 10 shots, do a tiny bit of photoshop to add some coffee to her tiny cup, and I’m done.
My only touch to this shot was so (rather sloppily) draw in some coffee in Cosette’s cup. The lovely butterfly cup is one of my Mom’s – probably uncovered on one of her Goodwill runs
Except . . . and this happens to me all the time . . . now I love this second shot so much, that I feel like the first shot (of the two of them at the coffee pot) doesn’t measure up to my new standard.
So, I decide that I don’t have to have the two of them together in every shot, and I go back to that very first idea I had, of Rat alone on the coffee pot. By now, I have some cold coffee in the pot, and it’s appropriately misted with coffee, so all I have to do is take the shot:
BJD rat proving that he can hold on to just about anything, even a glass coffee pot
And, there you are. Altogether, it took me about an hour (although the last shot of rat on the (cold) coffee pot was taken much later in the day). This is a pretty good capture of my “process” – experimenting, cycling back, and often arriving – at the end – exactly where I started.
I’ve become pretty fussy about good shots. I used to accept pretty much anything which seemed “good enough” and moved the story along. Now, I really want each shot to be good. I have no idea how that new standard is going to hold up when I get back to Among the Flowers where the plot is pretty stiff and I have to include some shots just to make the story clear.