Thursday, December 20, 2012

is it real or is it memorex?

A mini trick I picked up years ago is to take a picture of a work in progress and see how it reads through the camera's eye.  Its amazing what you miss with the naked eye, but the same image seen through a lens brings into sharp focus where you are going wrong, and where you are dead on.  A little something held down with museum wax looks perfectly fine till you see in the picture that its levitating right off the shelf a good inch or so because it was not placed down firmly...at least that's how it reads on film.  I never really thought about why you can spot these discrepancies on film and not with your own eye till I was typing this very blog post.  Its all about scale, as it always is with good miniatures.  The camera fools your eye into seeing the scene in the life sized scale that your eye is naturally attuned to.  Things that are not properly scaled stand out in sharp contrast to the properly scaled things surrounding them.  Our naked eye dismisses these discrepancies when viewing a miniature live but in a picture we are forced to reckon with them.  So for me, the earmark of a good miniature is that it could pass as full scale in a photograph.  What do you think?  Am I close?

3 comments:

  1. Very interesting? Or could it be in reality that what ever appears to be levitating is sitting on an unpopped popcorn kernel and therefore appears to be levitating? I do believe it is all about perspective.

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  2. would that be a miniature popcorn kernel or a full scale one?

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