Doll club, 2/14/09

With my new camera, I finally got some respectable photos of others' beautiful dolls in attendance at last Saturday's doll club.  ( Read more... )

Pet peeve: poor photography

Besides poor posing, I really dislike poor doll photography. Like any other visual art, photography has many aspects that one can alter for varying effect: lighting, framing, focus, etc. [No, I don't know the technical terms.] However, I have, unfortunately, experienced way too many photos where these aspects are altered out of sheer ineptitude, rather than artistic consideration. While we poor amateurs may not be able to take photos as beautiful as those of the masters, we can at least follow some basic rules to make our own works functional:

• The camera should be focused on the subject. If the subject is a particular doll head, I don't want to see fine-grained, macro-level detail of the wall just behind the doll. [Here's a beautiful example in the first panel of Unreal Life 1.5.]
• Lighting should be appropriate to the subject. Consider that fluorescents make things yellow, and flashes tend to wash out the subject. [And here in Unreal Life 4.6, we can't even see what's happening because it's too damn dark.]
• The level of blur should be appropriate to the subject. If the dolls are supposed to be running, feel free to move the camera as the shutter is closing. But, if you're supposedly taking a static shot, blur sabotages all the detail that you're allegedly capturing. [Unfortunately, all the pictures of Meg's Onyx that I took at doll club on Saturday were blurry!]

I really can take a decent picture, though, you know!

Because fat is a contagious creeping crud. [Also...I want this doll.]

Latinworks made a series of ads for activelifemovement.org, each depicting sedentary, fat versions of childhood toys, surrounded by the detritus of junk food. The tagline is "Keep obesity away from your child." Yup...because we all know that fat is a horrible contagious disease invading from outside, and body shape and weight have nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with sitting around and stuffing your face, and, with enough willpower, you can enforce skinniness! Besides its misinformed, moralizing scare tactics directed towards weight, the version below the cut also features a problematic reshaping of a fashion doll body, a plastic icon already well analyzed for its vexed cultural messages. Nasty, misogynist, anti-fat piece of drivel.

I do want that doll, though, as well as some of the fat little Playmobil pirates seen in another ad in the series. This series makes me think that I should try again to make a fat doll. My first fat doll, Margie, came out pretty well, but I couldn't sculpt fats on her because I didn't have the right modeling compound. Now that I have some Sculpey, I can add fats to a doll's head and body!   ( Beware! Eeeeeeevil fats! )