Toy Soldier Photography

Toy Soldiers, originally uploaded by LeggNet.

Yesterday's post (link) featured a capture from a series I did photographing toy plastic soldiers (the cheap dimestore type) in various scenarios. I received a couple questions about the technique I used in creating the "look" of the shot, so here's a brief rundown of how I did it:

First, I shot the soldiers at their eye level (or at least tried to get that low) and looked for natural items (pebbles, twigs & such) to include in the photo that would look like full size real-life features when enlarged. I also placed other items (soldiers, vehicles, etc.) in the blurred background to add depth to the scene.

Second, in Photoshop, the two main things I did to create the wartime look was to:

1. Colorize the image using the Hue/Saturation tool (Hue: 43, Saturation: 15)
2. Add an overlay layer created from a scanned image of real film grain

All of my other post-processing steps involved the normal steps one would take on an image (sharpening, brightness/contrast, etc.)

Pretty simple. Here's a link to the complete set on Flickr: Toy Soldiers