Garage Photo Studio

Until recently, my photo studio has been in our basement laundry room. While the space was adequate, I quickly outgrew it. Fortune smiles on the patient, however, and some space cleared up in our garage!

I build a twelve foot wide backdrop from some PVC pipe and white, 108" wide muslin cloth. The cloth is suspend from the wood ceiling by the PVC pipe, string, and screw-eyes. The sides of the backdrop are pinned to the walls with clamps to stretch out wrinkles.

All the materials for this came in just around $50, a real deal. Nate and I are planning a snowy indoor shoot this weekend, so we will put this set-up to the test!

Avatar Scorpion Gunship Re-Finish

It has been too long since my last posting. Naturally, I have been crazy busy! One of the many things keeping my attention has been this Avatar Scorpion Gunship project. I picked up the toy at Fred Meyer, a little steep at $25, but I really like the design.

The toy came in pieces, which was actually quite helpful when re-finishing it. You can see the step-by-step progress on my flickr page here. My goal was to re-finish this so it looks like a piece of military tech that has seen some combat. I layered colored paint over metallic paint so that I could leave some metal exposed. The desired effect was to have it look like paint has worn off on the areas that would see more weather than others.

To finish it off I gave it a wash of brown paint to dirty it up a bit. What I ended up with is really close to my initial concept, so I am quite pleased with it!