Three Hot Toys Photos In One Day!

(Click on images to scroll)

I recently had the privelege of exhibiting a sort of retrospective of my toy photography at the prestigious Kooyumjian Gallery on the main campus of Webster University in Webster Groves, Missouri.

Samples of the images on display will almost certainly exist in the gallery page of this site, if they aren’t there already. All of those images will have been created long before I knew of the show.

But the gallery manager offered me the opportunity to display some supplemental images on their newly-acquired 65-inch 4k monitor. And, at the last minute, I finally made the effort to to make that happen. These four images were the result.

The first three images (of The Mandalorian on Swoop Bike, the Sandtroopers and Dewback, and Anakin running down a trio of Battle Droids in a STAP chase) were all shot in a day. This is remarkable because I used to take at least a day to do a single image.

I think there are multiple reasons for this.

First of all, the set pieces are not nearly as elaborate as they were when I was working at Sideshow. Rather than including full dioramas, I’m only hinting at the environments using rocks from my garden, or sand from a pet store.

Additionally, I’m taking less time to light them in the studio. Photoshop’s tools provide ample opportunity to correct certain things in post, so long as you get it relatively close when you make the shot.

By way of example, I’m including the pre-Photoshop versions below.