This photograph is a few years old already, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to show it off and actually explain what it is. At first glance, it honestly doesn’t even really look like a photograph. Which is cool, I guess, if someone was looking for a digital manipulation tutorial. But really, well… there’s actually not much digital manipulation happening here. No, really. The majority of the image was done in-camera. Seriously.

Okay, fine. I’ll explain.

My mom loves Hobby Lobby. It’s her Mecca. And, there was a point in my life where my wife and I, for some mystical reason, kept moving into apartments with a Hobby Lobby nearby. So it became a bit of a tradition to hit up the current apartment-adjacent Hobby Lobby whenever she came for a visit. This is all just setting up why I was one day walking down the model/miniature aisle of the local HL with my mom right next to me.

I saw a T-Rex model and made a comment about how nicely detailed and well-done it was. I used to love dinosaurs as a kid (and really, I still do), and a lot of my favorite vacations and trips as a kid were nerdy ones to see fossilized tracks or large animatronic dinosaurs. And I had tons of dino books. I was Tim in Jurassic Park. She took me to the IMAX to see Jurassic Park.

Well, my mom heard me admiring this T-Rex, and spoke to me in that sad, empathetic mom/kid voice, “Aww, do you want me to buy you a dinosaur toy?”

To which I replied, “Well, yeah, kinda.”

So my mom bought her 35-ish year old son a dinosaur toy.

I owned the T-rex for approximately one day before I wanted to photograph it. I’ve always been fascinated with miniatures like toy trains and doll houses, with their small lights and tiny details. There’s a childlike joy to them that I don’t think ever goes away, especially if you’re a big doofus like me. I decided I was going to try my hand at photographing a different kind of model. I immediately got to work, swiping my art desk clean of anything that didn’t have to do with my epic dinosaur masterpiece.

*Okay so maybe I didn’t clean my desk at all*

The first thing I had to decide was how to light a small T-Rex without blasting the crap out of him with a flash. Small objects need small light sources, or else the illusion of a gigantic dinosaur might not quite work. Luckily, I shot a wedding a few months prior and there were these cool little decorations with bottles and little LED lights and some flowers and stuff. At the end of the night they were looking for something to do with them, so I helped myself to one or two of those little battery operated lights and tossed them in with my camera gear. You can see the battery pack on the right of the desk, with the strand of pin lights tangled up to the left of the T-Rex. You can’t straighten out that wire once it’s wadded up like that. Don’t even try.

Next, I needed some foliage for my T-Rex to be towering over. My first thought was to get some grass, but that wouldn’t stand up on its own. A stick or a plant would be too large. Then it hit me, why not those little weird balls of moss that grow all over the mesquite trees? There were approximately a million of them outside my apartment, so it didn’t take me long to get my hands on a few. That’s what you see there on either side of the dinosaur. Weird little balls of moss tendrils. We used to throw them at each other when I was younger. Never once did I think, “Man this would make for great plant foliage lit by tiny lights in a dinosaur photo I’ll take in my mid-thirties with a camera that doesn’t use film.” Never once.

Anyways, that was pretty much it for the props. So how did that photo up there turn out like this photo down here?

Honestly, it’s all in the lighting. There were two sources of light in the image that really help to sell it. The first light source was the aforementioned battery operated LED pin lights sitting underneath, and the second light source was natural light from a nearby window behind him. It was later in the afternoon when I shot this, and that window was on the side of the building opposite the sun, so I was getting a nice ambient light through the blinds. These two lights sources illuminate the T-Rex from the sides, which is exactly what you want when trying to exaggerate and show off texture and definition. Also, by not lighting him from the front, it retains that air of mystery, letting you see him, but hiding just enough in shadow to not reveal too much.

A “happy accident,” as Bob Ross would put it, was that the color temperature of the LED pin lights was warm. Really, really warm. It was way too orange. So when I started adjusting the white balance manually on the camera, and thus “cooling off” the LED light temperature, the light from the window (which was cooler in temperature than the pin lights) turned blue. It’s a fun trick I use sometimes with a flash gel, but in this instance it was completely unintentional. But hey, if happy accidents are good enough for Bob Ross, they’re good enough for me!

You probably noticed in the desk photograph that the wall was a light beige color. It picked up both the light from the LED and the outside light. That gradient in the background was in-camera. The pink and bright blue toward the bottom? That’s the color of the horizon shining over a blue ocean. Just kidding, it’s the calendar on the desk that I didn’t bother to move out of the shot because I was lazy. But hey, Bob Ross, remember?

As for the camera settings themselves, I used my Nikon D800 with a 50mm prime lens, at f1.8, focused on the eye of the T-Rex. I can’t remember the shutter speed or the ISO, and honestly, they don’t matter here. What does matter is that f1.8 aperture. That is what gives the photograph the extremely shallow depth-of-field (DOF). It’s why parts of the moss and the hind-quarter of the T-Rex are out of focus. Again, no photoshop blur filter here, just in-camera focus. Aside from some basic brightness/contrast adjustments and a little bit of color tweaking, all of the effects seen in the photo are done in camera, except for one…

The clouds are fake. Now, I know I’m good, but I didn’t have any cotton, and I still have yet to figure out how use my Harry Potter wand to conjure cirrus clouds on a whim in a small two-bedroom apartment. The clouds were a last-minute decision, and they were done as a means of adding just a little bit of drama to the otherwise empty sky. Maybe it was the landscape photographer in me, but I needed clouds. They were added via a simple cloud brush I found online. I installed the brush, set the color to white, click-click, BAM! Clouds.

And that’s really all there was to it. One of the greatest things about this photograph is how much it doesn’t look like a photograph. I love it. Hopefully you do as well, and I really hope this maybe inspires you to try something new with your camera, get out of your comfort zone and have some fun with it. So get out there and shoot. Or stay in and shoot. It really doesn’t matter.

If you read this all the way to the end, thank you so much for sticking around. I debated for a while on whether or not to post this article. It’s very candid and light-hearted. Let me know if you’d like to see more serious takes on photography, or if things like this hold more value to you. In the end, I’ll do what I do, but it’s always nice to get feedback. Thanks for your time!

T-Rex At Sunrise: An Experiment in Miniature Photography

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