MAKE A MINI MOVIE SCENE

Mike Harris shows you how to use a macro lens and LED lights to capture a film-like image of a tiny action figure

- Mike Harris

If you’re a parent or grandparent to young children – or simply a big kid – it’s likely that you’ll have a few toys lying around. But before you pack everything away, consider whether there are any photogenic subjects that could be used to create a faux cinematic film still.

Toy photography is a relatively niche genre, but even if it’s not something that you choose to pursue it’s a great way to practise close-up photography techniques and learn about basic offcamera lighting setups.

Once you’ve chosen your subject, you can use it to inform the scene you’re going to create. We used a small figurine of Marvel superhero Ant-Man, which presented endless opportunities around the house, since the character can shrink down to almost any size and lives within the real world. However, if you simply want to copy our setup but don’t have the exact same toy, you could use a similarly-sized plastic soldier or Lego Minifigure instead. Our concept was to have Ant-Man running away from a knife chopping lettuce. The falling lettuce leaves were created by shooting multiple identical compositions via an interval timer, while physically dropping chunks of lettuce into the frame. We picked the best frames in post and blended them together using masking in Photoshop.