The 1987 Predator is a movie that gave me nightmares for so many nights and some very great memory of the scene in the movie! I got this Neca Dutch action figure some years back and since I wanted to do some cool toy photo. What better way to put this Arnold action figure than to put him in a proper jungle situation. The day is finally today and I decided to do it but without the fancy dioramas and background.
I usually use very extensive diorama and a collection of greeneries to achieve a jungle environment along with screen/background for extra kicks! But this time I was working on a 1/6 scale diorama for a collector, which is nothing fancy so I decided to do a photoshoot that will take lesser time setup and faster to move on if I dint like the setup.
And thanks to this Neca Predator Dutch action figure, which is very realistic so I have to work around him and decided to do a portrait style photo. For the setup, I just dropped this figure in the centre of a black canvas and laptop screen with a jungle background on it, as my laptop is only 13inches I rotated it to portrait. The greeneries on the front is kept there to hide the black canvas.
The camera set is interesting as I started using my telephoto lens more and more now a days for toy photography because of the background compression it gives… yeah I am still using my 15year old Nikon D3100 with 55-200mm telephoto lens. All came in together to make a beautiful shot.
I also made few more shot with the same setup… which also includes these two landscape shot. I actually wanted to just one shot but ended up doing far more than that and these two kind of became my favourite even these don’t stand a chance alongside the portrait shot that you see above.
I always love a good challenge and and photo shoots always opens up new challenge every time ad this time I wanted to see if my trusty old 40mm micro lens does any magic. Yeah till I explored the background compression with a telephoto lens this 40mm micro lens was my daily driver, so I gave it a shot with that and I was blown by the smooth bokeh it created.
As I am using a macro lens, I can push everything into a very close space (though I have dedicated toy room) and also use the same 13inch laptop screen as background, though the final will blur everything but knowing what there makes the process lot more interesting.
The camera did a decent job and locked focus on the subject, which is just few inches away from the lens. The most important piece of any great photoshoot is lighting… And I dint use any of my lighting equipment but just my overhead home lighting (just two) and they turned out quite well as I was going for a daylight like output.
I was so happy with the output with such a simple setup… so I may do one more shoot with Neca Predator along side Dutch or may use a upcoming diorama temple I am building. I put lot more photos in my Instagram (@figstop) along with more BTS and also follow me on Facebook (figstop) where I share more content on diorama builds and toy photography adventures. Till next time… stay safe… stay connected! Ciao.
