A Teenager's Dollhouse : April 2014

Easter Egg Decorating

, by Chloe

Doll Photography Tips: Let's Talk Lighting

I have had a few requests to do photography pointers here on da' blog.
So why not?

The first thing you need for photography is a camera. (hopefully it was obvious enough) Now in the dollie instagram world, there is a lot of controversy about this subject. For those of you that don't know this, I'm going to tell you in hopefully the nicest way possible:

The doll iPhone photographers often get angry at the DSLR (fancy camera) photographers claiming that there photos are just as good and you don't need a nice camera to do doll photography. Bla bla bla. Then they also get mad because the DSLR people have more followers, etc.

What is my side on this?

Honestly, I have no idea. I myself started out with iPhone photography, so I do feel some sympathy for these girls.

But cameras do matter. You also need some decent photography skillz.
I recommend starting with something nice, simple. When I swapped over to my DSLR, it was like woah, this is complicated. So, I suggest starting simple and working your way up!

All my photography is trial and error, so I will share what I have learned.

One of the things in my most recent photoshoot that I really struggled with was lighting. As you can see in the photo above, it's a little too sunny. Now, I can easily edit this to get the perfect look, but if I'm going for SOOC (straight out of camera) then this wouldn't work.

This one is a little bit better, to get the photo to be slightly darker I just turned my body a little bit.

And that is often what changes the lighting, moving slightly.

This one has good lighting.

Focus.

This picture above is focused on her bangs, rather than her face.

Now, the camera is focused on her face, but it's a little dark.

I moved slightly closer to get a better look.

AHHH! TOO MUCH SUN! And, shadows are being cast on her face which is not good.

Moving closer...Better? Hmm...maybe with a little bit of editing. This is not the best shot, but failure helps you learn. ;)

Full- body shot! As you can see, there is not too much sun, and there are no shadows. I'd say the only flaw here is that you can see the fence of a neighbor. If I moved the camera more to the left, I could fix that. (I could also crop it)