Creative writers often cite the mantra: write about what you know. It is certainly something that I find useful when approaching photographic subjects. While its true, that we should occasionally break from our norm to spark our creative streak, generally speaking - it's the things we consider our passions that we find most inspiring.
From a young age, the comic book world has always held a certain appeal to me. Books in general. For a young mind, words may be difficult to understand but images and artwork make understanding easier. As I got older, my appreciation of the artwork itself and the storytelling that accompanies it became a source of fascination and wonderment.
The Superheroes (and villans) are exaggerated versions of normal people - some may have incredible powers but it is their exploits, character and adventures that really held my attention. Most have flaws like you or I but it is their capacity to become great and realise their potential which serves as inspirational figures. The characters lend themselves well to television and cinema too. There have been many incarnations of these heroes and villains depicted on screen to varying degrees of success. Many are big budget productions that do their best to re-create the amazing visions of the artists.
All of which leads me to the my own project. I wanted to make photographs of superheroes in a cinematic manner; produce a set of photos, which I felt, would convey those amazing pages and dynamic films. I did not have the super budgets of a Hollywood studio so I would have to improvise. During my research, I came across the Star Wars pictures of Cedric Delsaux (www.cedricdelsaux.com) and the scale model photography of Felix Hernandez Rodriguez (www.hernandezdreamphotography.com). They showed what could be achieved with the right combination concept, editing, lighting and careful planning.
I settled on one character in particular, Iron Man/Tony Stark. The main reason for this, is that Iron Man himself looks a little like a toy model himself. Photographing someone like the Hulk or Wonder Woman would be quite problematic for me, given the amount skin textures on show. I acquired a scale model and set about coming up with concepts and ideas. As an added bonus, the model also has a very realistic face which would come in very useful when doing the shots with the mask off.
Now the great thing about comicbook (or 'graphic novel' - if you're more grown up) characters is that there is an abudance of imagery already available on the internet to spark ideas. This really was the most fun part of the whole project for a comic fan like myself! Seeing great artwork and having scale model toy to mess around with! Once the ideas had been written down it was time to actually do some photography.
Iron Man launching through the clouds was the first scene I tried. It is the only shot where the figurine was not shot on location together with the background. The clouds were shot first. This image was rotated upside down so that the clouds looked like the were shot from above. Lighting the model separately turned out to be a chore. Simulating the light reflecting off the clouds was difficult. Not impossible but certainly requires a greater workload.
The shot with St. Paul's and the Millenium Bridge was based around the idea to put Iron Man in a scene which had been photographed (probably) millions of times by people. It's a very recogniseable vista to anyone familiar with London. Just by having Iron Man in the picture would hopefully do enough to set it apart. Its shot entirely on location but with two photographs composited together. The motion blur was done post edit but could have easily been done with a bit of panning. Iron Man was slightly lit with a hand held light. The area is very popular with tourists and I'm sure that I'm in plenty of people's holiday photos now...
The next two shots with Tony Stark's/Robert Downey Jr's face were a lot more straightforward. Shot indoors. Two flashlights either side, equal power, dome diffusers on and angled slightly back towards the camera. The shot of the model holding the mask needed a softboxed flash as fill. The other had the softbox overhead and slightly behind just to subtly light the mask on top of the head. Its actually easier to light a scale model as opposed to a real life human because the lights are a lot easier to control. A little flash suddenly becomes quite a big light source. The poses were not what I originally had in mind. The original pose wasn't really working well so I decided to change my idea up a little and the perserverance paid off with the almost Hamlet-esque image. So from the initial frustration, came my two favourite images of the set.
The final shot of Iron Man coming into land was shot with the figure balanced on the roof of my garage, about 7ft above me. I used a 50mm lens just to keep the perspective from being too crazy. I exposed for the sky then just added a little pop of light to fill in the missing detail. Looking back, I should have used a white card instead of overcomplicating the shot with a light. Again it was a composited shot, the clouds and light were just a little too far to the left to be used as a one shot background.
This set of images were a lot of fun to produce. It also involved a very steep learning curve for me in terms of processing the images. I will probably add to this set in the future as there are still a couple of ideas I'd like to explore. From start to finish, it took about six months to complete. It was quite a time/cost intensive project but I'm very happy with how the images have turned out.
