For this Independence Day, I decided to do a toy photoshoot with my Marvel Legends action figures. I love doing themed toy photography with my miniature pros and action figures and Independence Day of India is a colourful theme right next to Holi (festival of colours) festival. For this year my idea is to bring out patriotism and joy in a single pic. With the idea hatched, I spring into action… as my weekdays are packed, I only had couple of days to organise props and also to bring out the theme properly.
Because I wanted the main character to depict Indian origin, I did a kitbash to get that look… The body is of Marvel legends “Star Lord” from GOTG Vol-2 (Gladiator Hulk wave) for his causal looks, bearded head from cosmic Spiderman and right palm from Demogoblin wave Shang-chi. This palm gives me the same gesture of salute.
I also gave him a flag prop, which is actually a custom made (by my sister for this shoot with 1:18 Tata Nano) for 1:18 AKA 3.75inch scale… but it did it’s job well. This combo was really cool and all gelled nicely and you cannot say it is a Kitbash even from most angles! I could have done with a better flag prop but lack of time/resource could make you do sacrifices.
Even when the theme is at its initial stage, I planned on using a computer screen as a background, which should give a mountain peak kind of look to this otherwise boring look! So did some googling and found this background (wallpaper) from www.wallpaperflare.com with the keyword “mountain peak wallpaper”. I alway use a crop of the background, which gives that real background feel, same happened here as well.
I used my iMac 24 as my background serving screen and set the scene up… Felt the flat base in front of the rocky background dint look so good, so looked back at my base option and went to my favourite base for rocky look(used the same in my DC Justice League shoot)… Yeah it is a Jada nano figs display stand attachment, which is just too awesome.
With the base on, the scene was getting shape and started clicking. The camera I used here is my trusty old Nikon D3100 with a Nikkor 40mm micro lens. Did some 40-50 shot in varying lighting condition and poses and the finally this look stole my heart.
Though this out of the box look was good, I wanted to push it to its limit in post, so digitally removed the off-scaled flag and added one, which is of the real flag photoshopped to match scale and wave angle. In post I also removed some imprefection to make it as good as possible!
Then finally added some greeting text and wrapped it up! On second thought I felt something vital missing and added a mask to the figure (digitally of course), which made the already good looking photo, great! The mask also gave some relativity to the current COVID 19 situation delivering a much needed message. I had loads of fun creating this master piece in the shortest time, hope you love it too. Happy Independence Day, Jai Hind.
