This was my first foray into macro photography and, considering how much I knew about the subject to start with (zero), I think it went pretty well.
The chick and bunny are (obviously) Peeps, and the trees are Peeps too (and, in fact, should be available now, if last year was any indication). I amde the landscape out of styrofoam and covered it in that “snow batting” that you can get at Michael’s (Note: if you want to do something like this in Sept., you’d probably better squirrel some snow stuff away now, ’cause it’s pretty hard to find in autumn).
A few months ago I saw someone making some sculpture thing out of styrofoam on the Carol Duvall show, and she pointed out that you could use styrofoam to “sand” styrofoam and get nicely shaped pieces. While “sanding” my landscape, I discovered that styrofoam “sawdust” looks a lot like snow, so that’s what I sprinkled around the base of the trees and the feet (?) of the bunny and chick.
The backdrop is just a piece of scrapbooking paper printed with clouds, leaned up against the windsheild of my MINI (which, as it turns out, makes a great base for macro photography).
I had to tinker with it quite a bit in photoshop, as the manufacturing of Peeps is not a precision process, and my choices for main characters were either wildly deformed, but with perfectly placed eyes, or shapely, but crazy-eyed. I went with the shapely ones and then moved their eyes in Photoshop. I also had to do a lot of retouching on the trees, both manually (invovling scissors and re-application of green sugar) and in Photoshop (making the ornaments look right and replacing ones where the icing had fallen off — these trees were 8 months old by the time I got around to this!).
Then, of course, there was the color tweaking, etc. etc. I had the paper ones printed at CafePress and then made the e-version from those.
Whew.
7 comments
jason0x21
December 22, 2005 at 7:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You made it! Wow!
gina
December 22, 2005 at 7:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yup. I didn’t think of writing that on the card, but perhaps, in retrospect, I should’ve…
darthsunshine
December 22, 2005 at 7:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That is fantastic! You should, be proud!
gina
December 22, 2005 at 7:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So, where are you these days? Jeff and I will be at Wilbur from the 26th-29th…
:-)
darthsunshine
December 22, 2005 at 8:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Living in Ukiah which is, I think, about an hour and a half west-ish from Wilbur.
The 26th we’ll either be near Sebastopol w/ friends or back home in Ukiah (depending in large part on whether Kai has to work Monday). The 27th we’ll be back at work, and Kai’s parents will be showing up sometime that day to stay with us for a couple of days.
So all told I expect that I won’t manage to see you this trip, sadly. Although I’ve always heard lovely things about Wilbur. :D I’m sure you’ll have an enjoyable few days there!
thebroomecloset
December 22, 2005 at 9:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh, my, gosh. That’s really cool. I hadn’t guessed that you’d made it. I thought you had just found the perfect card. Well done!
gina
December 23, 2005 at 4:53 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thank you! You know, my own mother didn’t even know I’d made it… and I asked her to hook me up with a woman she works with who is a photographer for advice on macros!