I wanted to find an older looking doughnut shop so that I could “drop” my miniature vintage vehicles into the scene. While out looking for barns to photograph in Uxbridge MA I came upon this Jumbo Donut shop and thought it might work nicely for the image.
Once back at my studio I photographed the motorcycle (which was about 12″ long), the police car (which was 1.5″ long) and the green vintage vehicle (which was 1.5″ long) in a studio setting. I used a Nikon D7100 using a 60 mm MACRO lens tethered to Helicon Focus and Helicon Focus Stacking software. I had a three light set up and an all white background which allowed me to easily extract the vehicles in photoshop.
Using a MACRO lens I was able to get extreme close up images in a 1:1 life size reproduction. This would allow me take a 1.5″ vehicle and blow it up to a 4′ x 5′ print, if I chose to, without losing any detail. However for this exercise I just wanted to copy and paste these images into the Jumbo Donut shop scene. Of course the vehicles need to be photographed at exactly the same angle they would be when inserted into the Jumbo Donut parking lot.
For those that don’t know MACRO photography has a very short depth of field. At f8 the first 1/8″ approx. is in focus the rest of the image is out of focus. Hence the need for Helicon Software which allowed me to automatically take 51 consecutive images. With each image the focus point would advance just slightly. After all 51 images are taken Helicon would then compress them into one final images. This is all done in a few minutes while if I did this in photoshop it would take me about 45 minutes.
The end result is to end up with an image that is realistic looking. Hopefully I accomplished that. This type of photography is a lot of fun to me and allows me to create various scenes I might find interesting.
A total of (4) images were taken:
The Jumbo Doughnut shop was photographed with a Sony A7RII 42.4 MB mirrorless camera and a Sony 24-105 F4 lens @ 37mm.
Aperture priority, RAW, 1/640th, F11, ISO 400.
The vehicles were photographed with:
Nikon D7100, 24.3 MB DSLR, and a Nikon 40mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
RAW,1/4 sec., F8, ISO 100, 51 consecutive shots/each vehicle
Helicon Focus Focus and Helicon Focus Stacking Software
Photoshop cc 2021 – images were merged to create final image
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