With over 100 Takashima images complete, I wanted to share another test page, where Keaton meets 2 ‘runners.
I shot several images of the dolls reflected in a monitor. The reflections looked initially fine, but once they were run through the two actions, the reflections disappeared. In the end, I shot the dolls and layered them onto the monitors, reducing the opacity to give the illusion of a reflection. The doll images were short against a white background, extracted in Photoshop, composited with a Pexels empty office image. For the 3rd image, I shot the 3 dolls together. One photo is of Keaton in focus and the other has the ‘runners in focus, then layered with the in focus Keaton placed lower in the stack so the ‘runners appear in the foreground.
I chose my Canon 50 mm lens but couldn’t get the correct aperture for all the dolls to be in focus at the same time. In reality, your eyes would focus on either the foreground characters or background characters. But I’m enchanted by Orson Welles (actually his DP) ability to capture the foreground and background in perfect focus. He did in this in Citizen Kane to great effect.
I’m not sure if I chose the wrong lens or if I didn’t find the right aperture setting. However, figuring that out in camera is a future photo shoot. I’m so close to completing the Takashima images, that I can’t get sidetracked with in camera tricks at the moment..