Photography Science

Hey! We're still amped for Little Miss Playthings, right?

So, at the Playthings forums, user k8c asked me about taking pictures of dolls with bangs. How do you get rid of the shadow over their eyes?

And my reaction was, "What shadow?" I'd never noticed. I have three different sorts of bangs in my collection: the little tiny bangs, the huge pie bangs, and no bangs. (I'm missing the new bangs, and I love you all, but I wasn't going to buy another doll just for this experiment. I grabbed three test subjects, took them outside, and put them in the sun:

Oh. See Sara, over there on the left? There's a shadow on her eyes. Huh.

Well, I don't know. Maybe different times of day would help? The picture above was taken around 9 AM.

Here we are at noon. Sara's looking better, but this might just be because of how she's positioned -- look at poor Jess and Ivy!

This one was in the late evening ... 8, I think? Actually, everyone's doing pretty well. That might be the trick, waiting until there's less light?

Actually, the best photo I took, I took around the tool shed in my yard.

Aside from the crappy posing, there's no real problem with the facial shadows. Nice! I took it in the shade, not the sun, which is the key.

This has to do with light diffusion -- the way the light is hitting your photography subject. There's plenty of science you can google if you want to read up on it, but mostly, light directly on your doll? Shadows. Light rays shuffled around? Less shadows.

That's probably why Sara doesn't look so bad in the noon photo -- my tomato plant is diffusing light for her. :-P!

If you've ever heard someone say that they like to shoot when the clouds are out? They're using clouds as a diffuser. Which may or may not work fine, depending on your clouds. If you've got a photographer's light, it probably has some sort of diffuser, like an umbrella or a screen. Even if you don't have one of those, as with all things, Google has your hook up.

Actually, the fill flash on your camera is supposed to act something like a light diffuser, but ...

... the flash on your camera sucks.