Field Trip in the name of 'research'

Today I dragged my kids to Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
I had heard of it previously but never felt the need to visit until this project.  I was expecting all sort of complaints from my children, but was somewhat surprised when they all enjoyed it (even the teenager!).  We actually walked around a couple of times, spotting different things each time.  The level of detail put into the 1.5 acres is really impressive.
The model village first began to be built in 1928 and has grown and evolved since then.  More details can be found at http://www.bekonscot.co.uk/history/full/ but be warned, the site is somewhat annoying, employing not only comic sans (cringe), but the home page greets you with a friendly 'hullo!'    bleurgh!!!!!
anyway..... I took the camera, funnily enough, and here are a few pictures from the day.  I have included a couple of images to show the scale (that being the name of the game after all) and the rest I have tweaked, just for fun.

GIANT LADYBIRD SPOTTED!

The farmer who took this picture couldn't believe his eyes and is concerned for the welfare of his flock.

okay, so not really.........  but I have decided to carry some tiny animals with me in case I find more insects, and create a second collection of photographs, just for fun!

playing with perspective

http://www.uphaa.com/blog/index.php/forced-perspective-photography/

Snow globes

Artists Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz construct eerie scenes inside snow globes.
Your traditional snow globe contains a cute little wintry scene, maybe a house, a snowman, people playing in a wintry wonderland.  What Walter and Paloma create is a little different!

Walter and Paloma have been working together since 1993.  They create miniature figures and set them in snowy outside scenes, often depicting something somewhat disturbing.  The snow globes are part of their Travelers series.  Only 250 signed globes were made, and searching online suggests that they sell for about $750!

See their website for more. http://www.martin-munoz.com/recent/index07.html

Tiny People

Following on from the Alice post I wondered how many stories there are about/featuring tiny people.
Here are a few to begin with....

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
The Wee Free Men (and other Discworld novels featuring the Nac MacFeegles) by Terry Pratchett
Inner Space - 1987 science fiction comedy film, inspired by Fantastic Voyage

I am thinking of miniature people, so maybe fairy folk, but not elves, gnomes, oompa loompa's, etc.

Your challenge is to think of more for the list!

loosely linked to my project, sort of...........

Here is an extract from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.  This is where Alice has found a tiny door, beyond which is a beautiful garden.  She wishes that she knew a way to shut herself up like a telescope so that she could go and explore.  In the passageway behind her there is a table....

'There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters.

It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

However, this bottle was NOT marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

* * * * * * *

* * * * * *

`What a curious feeling!' said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope.'

And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; `for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.'
 

It occurred to me

that I haven't explained my idea for a project, whoops!

A little while ago I discovered the work of Slinkachu, a London-based artist who creates very small street-based installations and then photographs them: from far away and up-close.  He takes tiny model people and modifies them to suit his purpose, then constructs a scene in the street, photographs it, and then leaves it there.
You could easily walk past a Slinkachu installation and not know that it is there!

http://slinkachu.com/

In his work Slinkachu produces a close-up and a wide shot of each piece, I want to produce just a wide shot but to play with the idea of scale.  I don't want it to be immediately obvious that it is a tiny model person in a normal sized environment.  The models that I intend to use are HO gauge (1:87 scale) and are generally used for building model railway set-ups.

The first shot planned is of a little old lady with a trolley full of shopping making her way across a supermarket car park, details to follow.

Side-tracked while researching

While conducting research on the web into similar photographic projects I came across a new toy.  Although it isn't something which I intend to use in this project I wanted to share it simply because it is fun!

Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.

Now you can easily transform your existing digital camera photos into tilt-shift style miniatures using tiltshiftmaker.com

here's one I made earlier:

Not the best quality but hopefully you can get the idea.  The first is the original image, and the second is the 'model'.
I have a horrible feeling that I could lose hours on this........

I can do this.... honest!

For a complete technophobe the idea of keeping a blog should be somewhat terrifying, but it's not!  I am actually looking forward to this, perhaps I am just a bit of a masochist......

The brief is to keep a blog from the very beginning, through production, to the end of a photographic project.  I intend to blog at least twice a week, firstly with plans for each shoot and secondly covering how the shoot actually went.  I will also be including who I am researching from the photography field and other relevant information.

So, I guess this is my 'test' post..... fingers crossed!