Miniature Scenes Show and Tell

Inspired by Jacki Gordon’s recent club talk on her Totie Photies images, we decided to have a go ourselves. The rules were simple - the images had to feature a figure such as a human character or animal and they had to be at miniature scale. Members could make as many entries as they liked.

Fancy Footwork

As in this photograph of a colourful Dr Martens boot being given a paint job, an everyday object can be incorporated into the picture in order to create not only a sense of scale but also a sense of humour.  The tiny painters here are 00-gauge figures, as more often seen in toy railway dioramas.  They can be ready-painted and often come in sets with a common theme.  There’s no doubt that the effect is very good, but being so small they are extraordinarily fiddly to arrange and frequently topple over. Some of the members resorted to Blu Tack, glue or, failing that, prayer to keep the little guys upright.

Another popular option for characters were LEGO® Minifigures. These are much larger and can be posed to a certain extent, which can help with creating a story and bringing that all important sense of theatre to the scene.  However, ingenious club members used everything from brooches to Christmas decorations to be the actors in their diminutive dramas.

One Small Step for Man

On the technical front, only a few members chose to employ macro lenses, showing what is possible with just your regular equipment and a lot of imagination.  When really close in, depth of field is sometimes a problem and might cause important parts of the scenes to appear out of focus - although this could also be used for creative effect due to it giving the impression of those elements being in the distance.  Increasing the areas in focus requires either stopping the lens aperture right down, combined with a long exposure, or using focus stacking, which is a software technique for generating an image from multiple photographs.  Fortunately, none of the scenes had moving elements (at least, not deliberately) which made either of these techniques highly suitable.

This was a fun event and gave us all a chance to try something different, away from our normal comfort zones.  The entries were judged by members and at the end of the evening a prize photo-themed mug was awarded to Susannah Smith for some outstanding pieces, including the Fancy Footwork image above.  The complete set of submissions are available to view here.