My friend Dave Allen has created an elaborate diorama of Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn. This will be moved to the History Center of Olmsted County for a roundtable discussion of the event this coming Sunday. I took some photos of the diorama for him yesterday.
It’s pretty remarkable, representing a ton of work. Dave says it’s to scale in that each of the small figures represents four real people, horses, etc. Seeing it in person, it’s rather clear that the numbers favored the Native Americans.
Each of the figures has to be painted by hand, riders placed upon their steeds. Dave created and painted the teepees from scratch.
I don’t photograph miniatures much. When you are in close, depth of field is a big deal if you don’t want only a tiny region to be in focus. I shot mostly f/9 and f/11. Occasionally, I turned it up to f/13. I don’t mind a bit of blur to help draw the eye to one area, but you can see that even at these relatively small apertures, when you’re close and the layout is deep, you do need to think about this.
How does that translate to the lighting? Yeah, it means we need a lot of light. I had my normal three speedlights and shot all three through a pair of umbrellas. I placed all the light on one side to make the lighting more realistic to the event. I asked Dave which direction was north and he said it was afternoon, so all the light is coming from the west. The umbrellas keep it from being harsh light – perhaps we’ll just assume there were some thin, high clouds!
I used manual mode for the flashes and had them all set around 1/2 power. Most of the time for portraits, I shoot around f/5.6 or f/8 and have the lights nice and close to my subject if possible. So this was quite different. It was also tough to make the light consistent from west to east, but I was able to overcome that pretty easily in Lightroom.
It’s always fun to try something new. The key is having a good foundation of ideas and tricks from which to pull.
