Pokemon Zukan / Zuken Collection Update

[maxarceus]

Good day everyone!

A couple months have passed since October the 25th, and that means it's time for another collection update! As always there's plenty of new stuff to show including a whopping  NINE 10/10 items!

I've also gotten yet another step closer to owning all bird Pokemon! Some really gorgeous stuff coming.

This post will be massively

Comments

[maxarceus]

I use a Nikon D80, which is a decent camera, but honestly, it's really outdated by now. It's like 15 years old or something. There's far better consumer cameras nowadays. The Eevee set often costs like 120 euros or so. Billy Mays, a (dead and) popular tellcell commercial guy known for always saying "HI BILLY MAYS HERE!" when introducing himself and "But wait! There's more!" when seemingly having reached the end when going over the features of whatever product he's advertising.
As to how I make these photos.. It's a lot of effort but basically...
1: Set up a white space. This is basically a large white non reflective/shining surface resting against the wall and raised flat surface with a soft, gradual bend. I used a movie poster's backside and overlayed that with A4 sheets of white paper to hide the reflectivenss.
2: Put the camera on manual mode, and on a tripod. Also put it on manual focus and RAW format. I'm using a 18mm-135mm lens, and for most shots I'm all the way zoomed in.
3: Put the zukan onto the white space, avoid any seems where different sheets of paper meet.
4: Now, the best would be to have a large white lamp straight overhead, or even better, that in combination with dozens of leds hidden underneath the white space material, which then'd be professional and made out of cloudy, but semi-transparent plastic. I don't have any of that, so I use the movie poster, and just the yellow room light that hangs where it does.
5: Zoom onto the zukan such that it's as big as you can get it without it being bigger than the photo. Focus manually on it. Choose an appropriate aperture (I use F/10 most of the time, but for certain shots I go higher. For the shots of the water scene seen from the end, I went as high as F/36)
6: Fiddle around with exposures until the background is just barely fully overexposed. Be sure not to have any overexposure in the figure itself. In my case this was 10 seconds at F/10, and of course with the smaller apertures, longer exposures.
7: Take all the photos, this takes hours each time in my case.
8: Put photos onto computer, and import them in Adobe Lightroom.
9: Correct for lens distortions, correct the whitebalance, tweak the Hi's, low's, mid's, etc. tweak the contrast, crop if necessary, hide the seams of paper sheets if they show up. (This took like 6 hours in this batch)
10: Export and upload

Now, for the shots of the glow in the dark, and the ones where the water shine is clearly visible, I had to experiment, use different exposures, and play around with direct flashlight light in short bursts from several angles. In case of the Zubat/Mewtwo scene I also used photo blending, where I'll take one normal, well lit white-space photo, and then a dark photo of the glowing, and then try to mix them to get best of both worlds.

[j_degnan]

That’s spooky-
for the past two weeks I’ve had this picture on my work shelf:


I had no idea who it was!
My dad bought me an engraving tool and I kept the picture for some reason...

[maxarceus]

Well, that's him :p Rather, was him

[j_degnan]

He was on a hell of a lot of drugs...
You’d never know given his winning smile and professional veneer.
Still, that engraving tool is pretty decent.

[maxarceus]

Yeah :s
Do you think you can do something with the photo process I described?

[j_degnan]

I do, took a screenshot of it,
I’m going to follow it closely.
Been a bit busy but I appreciate it!
Also thanks for the help getting Gyarados!

[maxarceus]

You mean the mega gyarados? Np man!
https://photography.tutsplus.com/tutorials/step-by-step-guide-for-building-a-seamless-white-backdrop--photo-2751
Mine is way more gettho than this, but it shows the basic principle.

Did you see my other comment on the other post about the new zuken set?

[j_degnan]

I'll check that out too! I did see the zukens yeah- that guy doesn't like the Steelix! I think it looks pretty good actually...

[maxarceus]

I wanna get one of the Arceuses and the normal Mega Steelix

[j_degnan]

I like the Zebstrika,
even though it isn’t very dynamic...

[maxarceus]

It'll probably get on sale next week, once the Chinese Spring Festival is done

[maxarceus]

It's up on Tao
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a21wu.10013406.0.0.5e7db7b6EGBfMS&id=587029987857

[j_degnan]

Cheers bud-
I’ll probably leave it until something unmissable (for me) pops up.
Look at that base though (the one with ‘big rock snake’ vs ‘big steel snake’)!

[maxarceus]

Looks pretty neat yeah
I will get an Arceus, not sure yet about Steelix

[j_degnan]

It’s a bit expensive isn’t it?

[j_degnan]

The one I clicked on seems to include 2 tyrantrum so my mistake!