Forced Perspective, Anyone?

Here is one I took recently.

 

 

So I've been trying my hand at this, and it's quite challenging. Not only do you have to worry about lighting and posing the dolls as usual, but now all of this is compounded by trying to photograph a distant subject and a close one.

 

This poses the additional challenge when trying to use a very small aperture size for a large depth of field restricts light. To my experience, it also really only works in an exaggerated situation of a very close subject and a very distant one being in focus if you're using a telephoto lens and are yourself very far away to maximize the size of your depth of field. Since I don't have that many lens options and I really don't have much room to do this kind of thing, I have to "cheat" by taking multiple pictures, and this increases the complexity as now I really only have Photoshop as a solution, and that has been a bit of a headache as well.

 

Any tips? What lenses would work well? I'm a beginner at this so if there's easier ways I'm open to suggestions and critique. Tips and tricks in photoshop would be appreciated as well.

 

Here is the setup, it has the individual pictures I had to composite, and also a wide-angle of how I was set up to take the pictures.

 

 

Basically for the photoshop, I auto-aligned the images, then carefully selected sections to layer them. I had to manually match lighting and try to make shadows where I think they'd be and generally fiddle at it for hours.

 

I've taken another forced perspective image like this, but it has a Volks Super Dollfie next to my Marisa Dollfie Dream so I'm not sure I can post it here. If it's okay to post, I'll post it but I'd rather ask first.

I think you pretty much did it the only way you could with what you were trying to get, to have her hold something. I guess technically this is forced perspective as you were trying to get her and the gun to look the same scale, but traditionally it's used more to make people look like giants, or famous buildings to look small. As for setup, yes, using a wider lens at a smaller aperture is what you need to get a bigger depth of field.

I guess technically this is forced perspective as you were trying to get her and the gun to look the same scale, but traditionally it's used more to make people look like giants, or famous buildings to look small.

Not sure what else to call it, I had the doll about two feet from the camera with the prop six feet away from the camera. It's less severe than making a building the size of a penny or something, but the principle is the same.

 

As for setup, yes, using a wider lens at a smaller aperture is what you need to get a bigger depth of field.

I'd like to have the lenses and the locations to do this kind of thing more, maybe to make a doll life-like in size. It's what I'd like to do eventually, it could definitely lead to some interesting pictures.

If I recall correct forced perspective is like sinclair already described, is playing with scale, to form one uniform picture without much post processing.

 

When photoshopping one element from one picture to another the definition becomes a bit blurry, even when you've used the initial setup picture to form a scale reference.

 

 

these are my attempts with a basic cheap 35mm prime lens with figures trying to match sizes with different scales:

 

Team aegis:

figures021

 

Here the aperture was too small so the figma aegis in the foreground wasnt in focus, but more or less the spacing was enough to make the figma look as big as the artworks aegis thats four times as big.

 

Aperture was set to 13.0

 

 

Bunny-shot:

This was an attempt to get different scale figures to look more or less correct with each other.

 

the overhead shot:

figures094

 

and from the dead ahead view:

figures095

 

Mariyanne and Haruhi should have been a bit more to the back, but otherwise Taiga which was at the front is more or less the same size as Tomoka in the background that was a much bigger figure.

 

aperture was set to 22.0

 

The biggest problem will be getting enough light or exposure time to get everything in focus with the small aperture.

Here's the other one I did with a buddy a while ago. Again, nothing excessive, but the situation was quite a bit more simple than the picture with Marisa holding the pistol.

 

It all started when I was at my friend's house and Victorique was enjoying his well-filled library, but Marisa was interested in something specific.

 

Not so fast! Marisa tried to act all innocent but trying to fool a Gray Wolf is naught but pure folly.

 

 

And below was the setup. Those books are already pretty big, they would have just been comically massive if we hadn't put them further away. In retrospect, I think we should have moved them even further, but we were running out of room.

I did have the pictures done with a short depth of field, individually focused on Victorique, Marisa, and then the books, to have each subject be perfectly in focus. Due to the position of the subjects, the photoshopping needed to stitch the three pictures together was minor and mostly just automated with a few minor touch-ups after.