Saturday, May 14, 2011

A right royal pain in the arse (Setting the scene: Part Six)

So I rebuilt the Royal wedding scene (10 minutes including bunting making and tea cup finding: you were right, Pepper). Took 26 photos (10 minutes), pulled them off the camera and sent 17 straight to the bin because of focus issues, bits overlapping other bits and things chopped off that I hadn't noticed.

I sorted through the rest, found the best photo and used Office Picture Manager to tweak the contrast and saturation on it (15 minutes for uploading sorting and 2 for tweaking).

And, just as I thought I was done I looked again and saw:a giant ball of blutack under the paper hat, holding it in place.

Argh! You weren't supposed to see that and, since I don't have Photoshop at the moment (not even Elements), it was back to the proverbial drawing board rather than off to electronically erase the blob. (9 more photos in the bin: 30 seconds)

By this stage the sight of bunting makes me want to hurl, and I'm getting more and more frustrated trying to make sure all the various bits I do (and, more importantly, don't) want included are in (or out) of frame.

I finally decide, 12 photos (and 10 minutes) later that close enough is good enough. Load them to the computer, go straight to the last one (usually the best), and tweak it (2 minutes).

Then write and edit this post (20 minutes).

Finally I'll load the chosen image to my FLICKR photostream, tag it and add it to the Modern Miniatures pool (5 minutes, but I'll probably do my weekly check and clean up in there as well: another 10 minutes) before clearing the actual scene away (several weeks*).

(*Just kidding. I think)

1 comment:

  1. Fabulous! I love it. The bunting and hat give that extra depth and interest to the picture I think *nods*

    Photographing miniatures is a mare, no? Double sided sticky tape and blutack are our friends. From keeping folds in fabric to stopping stray stuff rolling off the furniture. Thank God we've moved on from film cameras. It would cost us a blummin fortune!

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