Recently I purchased a new-to-me WWE Elite Legends Ted Dibiase figure, with the explicit purpose of getting some photos of it to try and sell at an upcoming market that I will be attending, and where the Million Dollar Man himself will be a celebrity guest. Not only am I hoping to sell a print or two, I want to get one for myself to have him sign a piece of my own artwork of him. He came included with two different heads, two sets of hands, his Million Dollar championship belt, and a briefcase. The accessory he didn't come with was cash, and I thought that the Million Dollar Man needed a little money to throw around. To remedy this I first looked on Amazon to order a small pile of fake bills in the right scale, but I quickly found a very easy tutorial on how to print your own money that scales correctly with action figures of this size.
It was as easy as finding an image of both sides of some US bills on google images, inserting them into rows in a word document, printing them out and gluing them together. It was a fun little prop making exercise that helped me fell a little less stuck creatively (like I wrote about in my last post), and saved me a bunch of time and money. Once I had the bills finished, I quickly cranked out some test shots. Both to see how the money would look, but also because I really needed something for my weekly photo challenge goal. To be honest I wasn't crazy about it. It was ok, but definitely felt like I just kind of got something done quickly and not exactly the vision I had in mind. Nor was it something that I would want to put on display to attempt to sell. So a few days later I went back to the drawing board.
A month or so ago I did two courses on Linkdin Learning that focused on composition. One thing that the instructor really tried to hammer home was the idea of working the shot. Don't just go with the first photo or setup you shoot. It's hardly a new concept to me, but since I took that course it has been a phrase that has bounced through my head whenever I am shooting. So I wasn't happy with that first shot, so I kept working it. For the background, I use a computer monitor with that image on it. So I moved him closer to it, farther from it, centered him better, and just played with the figure and my camera distance until I found the framing that I liked. Anyone who knows what that background is will recognize the WWF New Generation archway so I wanted to make sure even a little part of the WWF logo was in the shot as well as the colours of the top of the arch. However even once the positioning was in place it was still missing something. So to fill it the empty space around him and emphasize the fact that he is the Million Dollar Man, I took bursts of images where I would drop money all around him. I took well over a hundred bust images, sifted through them and found what I thought was the best looking ones. Then I stacked them all together in Affinity photo blended the best parts all together into one cohesive image where money is raining down all around him.
In the end I am really happy with how this image turned out. It satisfied that stuck feeling that I wrote about in my last post, I made use of something I learned in one of the courses I've recently taken, I felt productive making props, and it produced an image that I am confident enough with that I think I can sell a copy or two of. Hopefully this is a positive sign of things to come, and a turn around for how I've been feeling lately.
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