Out of The Box: A Week of Misadventures with Action Figures in Front of the Camera

The first thing I should probably say is that this isn't a post about how good I am at staging toy photographs. As my older child likes to point out, I do a volume business; a beneficiary of the freedom offered by digital photography, I often shoot a thousand images and sift through 999 to find an occasional gem.

Admitting that, I was recently inspired by a series of videos from Adam Savage's YouTube channel "Tested" featuring Insta-famous California-based toy photographer Johnny Wu (i.e., Sgt Bananas). If you're unfamiliar with Wu's work, I highly recommend his Instagram feed as the quality of the work--the practical effects, the attention to detail, the narrative--is absolutely phenomenal. And in viewing his work, I was gripped by a common impulse of mine--to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, in their medium, to scratch my own recurring creative itch.

A lot of people blog because they're experts in certain areas. I suppose that's true of me too, up to a point. I collected comics and toys for long stretches of time going back more years than I'd care to count--eras that included my own childhood, the early years of my marriage, and then eventually various seasons of my children's childhoods. So, as I've mentioned previously, it gives me some insight into deep cuts of geek culture.

However, I've never thought of myself as a specialist. While I probably know the most about comics, my interests are at once both enormously eclectic yet also immersive. I believe--or hope--that my defining characteristic is that I'm creative. But I'm not especially picky--or at least not monogamous--in how I express that creativity. One day, I might be using chopsticks, resin and acrylic paint to make wands for a Harry Potter cosplay. The next day I might be helping my wife edit one of her science fiction novels. The day after that, I could be photographing pieces from a board game or sketching a mural on a co-worker's whiteboard.

I don't have any illusions about having world-class talent in any of these areas. But then that's not really my aspiration either. Some people are generalists because they don't have the discipline to choose a medium, a path. That's not how I view myself. The eclectic nature of this blog, of my life on the whole, reflects a conscious decision to sample all of it--to be a nerd of all trades.

In an upcoming post--after my soon-to-be-finished series on the Marvel cinematic universe (MCU)--I plan to provide something of a laundry list of my fandoms to serve as a menu of likely future blog topics. I can tell you in advance that it's a significant cross-section of the last 40 years of pop culture. I think that it's such a long list because I enjoy being part of this community of fans so much. I can't tell you how many times I've indulged in an hour-long conversation with friends or acquaintances about esoteric details related to any one of these topics. And it's those interactions that reinforce my love of the genres themselves.

So please enjoy the photos below understanding that this dabbling is, for me, a journey without much purpose other than to enjoy that journey and maybe strike up some interesting conversations along the way. If that dabbling continues for a few weeks or even a few months, I cannot say. But feel free to follow on my Instagram accessible here (Owl Cowl and Blaster on Instagram). In the meantime, see my inline comments below for some of the reasons why I chose these respective subjects or effects.

Mysterio

Annihilus

Abomination

Captain America

After seeing Johnny Wu's process and the resulting images, I noted that he worked almost exclusively with modern, highly articulated action figures. That makes a lot of sense, as these tend to have more detailed finishes to them and they would be infinitely easier to pose than figures with half as many points of articulation. I also noted that his set-up involved a decent amount of higher quality equipment that I'd be unlikely to purchase.

Rather than seeing those things as problems, it made me wonder "What's the best outcome I can achieve with just the materials I have on hand?" And so I immediately set about to figure out what that ceiling was--an endeavor that is still evolving.

First, I had to assess what those materials were and what I would be willing to use. One of the earlier decisions I made was to start from the opposite end of the action figure spectrum. In our basement and in boxes in my younger child's room, I knew we still had a lot of action figures--DC and Marvel--that pre-dated the highly articulated DC Select and Marvel Legends toy lines. And I wanted to actively focus on them--on whether I could create dioramas with those often-stiff-jointed toys that conveyed motion and/or a narrative.

I was also interested to do something very different from Johnny Wu in that I was going to eschew all pyrotechnics. If you watch the Tested videos, you'll see that his practical effects involve a decent amount of clean-up--powders, sparklers and other fireworks, etc. Given that I was just dipping a toe into the water--and acknowledging that I didn't want my wife to flip out over the prospect of open sparks or flames on our dining room table--I chose to revisit a technique I'd stumbled across when taking some pictures around Halloween last year. I'd use backlit cotton to give the appearance of smoke and flame.

Mysterio, at the top of the stack here, represented one of my first attempts. The shot spoiled me to some extent because I think it may still be the one where the cotton most resembles smoke or mist--especially in how it clings to the villain's gauntlet.

Annihilus, on the other hand, represents one of my bigger disappointments. Working with just my iPhone 7 camera, I found that I just couldn't capture a crisp image of this figure when illuminated exclusively by the mini-lights hiding underneath the cotton. So while I love the colors in that final product, I don't have any copies that can be used above thumbnail size.

Colossus

The Doctor Fate and Captain Marvel pictures from much further down in the stack turned out OK--the Captain Marvel one very directly reminds me of, and was inspired by, Alex Ross's art in the now classic Kingdom Come comics mini-series--but I was never able to fully realize the look I was going for with the Annihilus image in any subsequent setting.

At that point, I started to wonder how else I could use the cotton. The Captain Atom image--using a figure drawn from the Justice League Unlimited line--used it against the background of some blue and white patterned card stock which (I hope) gives the indistinct look of a cloudy sky behind the figure. The Wolverine image at bottom, on the other hand, uses a couple wisps of cotton to represent motion. (The tentacles were an off-brand play-dough.)

Captain Atom

And then I think I took it a little too far. Deciding that I wanted to use an old Captain America figure from a line of Spider-Man toys associated with the 90s cartoon--and wanting to show off his shield--I decided that I'd try to represent bullet deflection. In the picture of the good captain, I suppose I pull it off alright--which is probably unfortunate in that it emboldened me to the point where I tried several other variants. Only the Colossus and Abomination images included here can be viewed with a straight face--though I may post a couple of the others to my Instagram feed sometime just for laughs. While the images with the Marvel figures may be a bit cringe-worthy, imagine how the ones with smaller, less articulated Justice League figures must look. (Sigh.)

Doctor Fate

The final photo at the very top of the post--the Daredevil figure superimposed with the cover of one of my favorite comics from my collection--has the look of decoupage but was achieved entirely through editing. I have a few more that I will likely drop on Instagram over the next couple of weeks leading up to Avengers Endgame--as they involve characters that will be featured in the movie.

So, that's that. Love 'em or hate 'em, these images are an homage to the numerous overlapping hobbies and hobbyists that inspired me. If you have a favorite or if you want to suggest an effect I should try, please let me know in the comments section below.

Excelsior!

Captain Marvel

Wolverine