MattK doesn’t know it, but he’s slowly but surely pushing me out of the picture taking business. It’s bad enough that he lives in Southern California, so he gets his subscription from MattyCollector.com a day before I do. But then he had to start making custom dioramas.
First he made a ruined castle dio – I bet even the most diehard MOTU purists felt a twinge of regret after seeing 200X’s Count Marzo in Matt’s review. Then, to make it worse, he fashioned a rocky cliff face that he used for his review of Whiplash.
That brings us to this lonely picture I took of Whiplash yesterday. Seeing as how I’ll be doing a sort of “face off” review with VeeBee (who for some inexplicable reason digs the vintage head over the bad-ass modern head), I wanted to take a bunch of pics of Whiplash, who is now my top Masters of the Universe Classics figure. (That title had been going back and forth between Man-At-Arms, Tri-Klops, and Trap-Jaw for some time.)
Anyways, I could only manage one picture that I felt worthy enough when considering MattK’s review. I snapped the shot in my backyard near an old tree stump, in the afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees. My camera has a super-macro setting, so I used that and set the aperture as wide as I could, to get a narrow depth of field – that just means that my main subject, Whiplash, appears in clear focus while Trap Jaw and Beastman and the rest of the background objects get progressively more blurry the further away from the camera they are.
As much as I like how this shot turned out, I’ll probably have to make my own diorama one day. I like it much better when I can control the lighting, and I can’t see myself getting diffuser screens and lights I can set up outside. But no promises – I’m pretty sure MattK is gonna keep pushing the envelope.
Here’s some runners-up that I think are just ok. I probably should have taken some shots with Beastman further back for a more interesting composition. Thanks for looking!
Your favorites are pretty close to mine except I would add Evil-Lynn to the list. Whiplash is definitely up there, too.
Those are great pics, Ron. The compositions are nice and natural light beats ‘studio’ lighting any day of the week. Well, my cheapie shop lights, anyway. I love shooting with a shallow depth of field. It’s probably my current favorite photo trick to shove a lot of detail in the background, but only the subject is really in focus.