So the other night, my father-in-law asked if I would take some photos of some of his resin sculpture toy art robots. These are small, but very interesting sculptures designed by London based artist Cris Rose.

Well, we battled fading light conditions and a massive swarm of the most blood thirsty mosquitoes I have ever seen, but we came away with a handful of really great and fun photos.

This one in particular is my favorite of the set. It has several issues with it that I'll discuss shortly, but I really loved the dramatic lighting on this one. At this stage, we had just moved the robots under this stone bench next to the pond (obviously the source of all of the mosquitoes) - my father-in-law was helping by positioning the flash, but in this particular shot, I hadn't really told him where to point the flash, and we just kind of lucked out with this strong side-lighting.

The dark shadows - especially in the archway - really give a feeling of mystery. The texture of the stone bench archway and the pebbles helps to produce a nice scene and play with one's perspective on size of the scene.

I am a little disappointed in my selection of aperture which produced a little less depth of field than I think the scene could use. Additionally, I need to crop down slightly to eliminate the shadow in the top right corner (which is produced by the edge of the seat on the bench). And the large pebble directly in front of the larger robot is distracting... and for that matter, so is the smaller robot. The positioning, and the fact that the smaller robot has fell over makes it just look out of place.

I'll have to go reshoot this for sure...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Tokina AT-X M35 Pro DX AF 35mm f/2.8 Macro 1:1, 1/100 sec at f/4.5. Canon Speedlight 580EX II flash in auto mode and wireless control. ISO 100. RAW processing in Adobe Camera Raw.

I took several other shots of these robots, including some using TTV which I will share soon (but after I get through some more of the dive photos).

- Bill