136/365: Danbo FAmily Portrait Series: Catching Some Air!

In collaboration with Danbo Photography, we present a series of portraits featuring my Danbo Family.

Featuring One of The Twins, who just loves to do some aerials whatever the season (or surface) is:

Skateboarding in the snow? Now that is extreme!

Would have been easier if he had removed the wheels off that skateboard!

Actually, I do wished that I had taken the time to remove those wheels to convert the skateboard into a ski board. Nonetheless, it does make it look more extreme, if not silly.

Tune in for more family portraits!

112/365: Danbo Freestyle!

Danbo and the Twins do some stunts while Danbo 2 captures the action with the camera!

Inspired by the theme, “Freestyle” from the Flickr group “Danbo’s Adventures~❤”.

Horrendously hard to set up. It took me almost two hours just to stage the scene. The hardest part was getting Danbo’s pose; I had to use some strings hung from my desktop lamp above. It took even longer to wait for the swinging to stop.

An even harder thing to do was to light the scene. I was limited by my two desktop lamps so I had to use white foam boards to reflect the light back and fill in the shadow. I wished I could have lighted Danbo 2 better; right now, the details of the camera that Danbo 2 is holding is too vague.

Some Photoshop work to remove the strings and supports. I didn’t bother to remove the white double-sided tape on Danbo’s right hand as it was extremely difficult to do it.

Not as perfect as how I imagined it, so I am not very happy with this one. Unfortunately, time constraints and the not so ideal weather outside limited me to doing the scene indoors. Not the best execution, but I’ll take it.

Hopefully I can revisit this in the future and do it as how I wanted it. I have to settle for this one for now as time will not be a luxury for me anymore what with my animation work coming in once again.

More to come; until the next time, have a nice day.

072/365: Danbo Dirt Bike Jump!

It seems that my Danbo is really getting more extreme with her motorcycle stunts:

I would be very interested to see what people would think of this image as I am not particularly happy with how this turned out. To be honest, this is my least favorite scene so far. I had to do a lot of retouching and enhancement just to make it look “right”.

I think this is a case of me failing to execute the idea properly. Must be the stress of work. I had this vision for the scene, but I really had a lot of difficulty setting it up. My lighting was not that good too, as you can see the uneven fall-offs at the sides of the images caused by shadows of the light fixture’s articulated arm and the lamp that I placed in the foreground to help light up Danbo’s face.

I also had a hard time finding a nice angle for the shot. I had the idea in my mind but when I was trying to execute it, it just wouldn’t work for me. I liked the pose a lot, but I just couldn’t get the right shot for it. No matter where I move for a better view, the image that I was getting just wouldn’t cut it for me. Since I was running out of time I settled for a more conservative, regular straight on shot.

This may be the most “off” session I had of Danbo since I started out this project. Nothing seemed to work . It may be that I am too burned out with my regular animation work and the stress of trying to meet deadlines may have affected me so much that it translated to a bad set up and a poor (in my opinion) image.

Oh well, I will let this one pass and hopefully come up with something more better the next time. I think I may have run this whole motorcycle stunt thing to the ground already and milked the “Danbo doing stunts” enough. Setting up such complex scenes is too time consuming! Time to think of a new theme.

I may sound too hard on myself but remember that I do this to please my number one fan and critic: ME!

On another note: my streak of successively getting into Flickr Explore finally ended at six today (it could have been more had some had not been dropped). Yesterday’s image didn’t get in:

I guess my luck only goes so far. Rightly so; this slight obsession with trying to daily get into Flickr is affecting me a bit and is causing some slight interference with my regular work concentration. Time to give that one up!

More to come; until the next time, have a nice day!

071/365: Danbo Endo!

It’s starting to look more and more like a week of extremes as Danbo practices some stoppies:

Some Photoshop work to remove the strings supporting Danbo and the motorbike. I was attempting to do an “endless white” background in this scene but there were some fall-offs in the corners of the shot as the CFL lights in my desk lamps were not powerful enough to totally brighten everything up. I didn’t want to adjust the exposure compensation on my camera as things were starting to really look blown out in some parts of the image so I just settled with adding some vignetting.

I also went back to shooting with my 20mm Pancake Lens as I find that taking this image with my Nikon 60mm was not giving me a good result. I think a long focal length lens works better if there are some good background and foreground elements involved such as maybe real grass or shrubbery or what nots. I’ve always thought that my 60mm was the most flexible lens I have since I can use it for portraiture, general use and close up shots but in the case of my tiny Danbos I have to really work it to get the shot that I want.

I also need a tripod! I am getting good at hand-holding my shots and getting decently sharp pictures, even at say 1/30 shutter speed, but that’s with the fast 20mm lens. With my Nikon 60mm the camera shake is so bad that hand-holding it is virtually impossible unless I mount it on a tripod. Gotta work on that one hopefully soon as funds become more available.

Well, I have deadlines with animation work looming so that is it for now! To be honest, it’s a wonder that I can still squeeze in some time to do some photography. I think this activity has become my relaxation of some sort and a much needed creative jump start before I dive in with work.

More to come; until the next time, have a nice day!