Creative Splurges take all sorts of shapes and sizes. Although this website has ended up being by and large predominantly devoted to photography, in theory when I started it I was intending to share all sorts of creativity – and if you dig deep enough, there are a few posts of drawings and at least one swing at creative writing nestled amongst the hundreds of photography posts.
This post is a bit of a joint creative splurge. Whilst my main hobby is photography, my wife’s is crochet. Earlier this year she produced quite a few crochet critters to potentially sell at an art show, and asked me to photograph them for posterity before they potentially went to new homes.
I used a simple setup. I got a nice blue blanket and draped it over something to make it a smooth background, then positioned the critters in a suitable place to make use of my 85mm f/2 lens. Being a bit lazy, I elected to use the natural light coming in from my window rather than faffing about with off-camera flash. The results came out pretty well.
As you can see the light available was sufficient enough to still use an ISO of 100 at f/2. That said, I realised quite quickly that using an aperture of f/2 was a bit narrow for these little things. For this next guy I closed the aperture up a bit.
This next creature is one of my favourites, partly because its cute but also because the photo came out really nicely.
Here’s a little dog.
Sometimes the big challenge was getting each toy to stand up, either on its own or with something hidden out of sight.
The toys were various shapes and sizes, This unicorn was one of the larger ones.
For the most part I took single angles of each toy, but for some of them I tried some other angles.
This is probably also a good time to note that I’m no better at identifying crocheted creatures than I am real ones – not helped by the fact that some of these are magical creatures, and identifying those isn’t my forte either.
I like this guy. His face looks a bit like Kermit the Frog.
I’m pretty sure this winged bunny isn’t real either. Well obviously this one isn’t, it’s made of wool.
Although I do know a cat when I see one.
And a dog.
This gargoyle is probably the cutest critter in this bunch.
Meanwhile, this robot was probably the hardest to get to stand up on its own.
This pangolin was much more posable.
He even rolls up!
This pterodactyl, however, was a bit too floppy to pose nicely – but I think I did quite well in the circumstances.
This Rainbow T-Rex was also quite a bit floppy.
How about a polar bear?
I am not sure if I meant to open the aperture back out to f/2 for this shot. It’s something I’ve found I do instinctively sometimes, even when I’m intending to shoot at a narrower aperture. It did help for this closeup though.
The final creature is none other than Death itself, another one which was challenging to pose – mainly his scythe.
Some of these toys got sold, others were never meant to be sold (especially the ones made for me and our child), and many others have been made in the six months since I sat down to catalogue this assortment. Perhaps this means I should document some of the new additions as well.
Not every toy is posted above. As is becoming tradition, there are a few more in the gallery below.
