A Plastic War

Hello everyone.
As having been a little boy quite a number of years ago I had always enjoyed the company of little green army men. Of course some will say I haven't yet grown up and to some extent will agree with that comment. When I married my current wife she had a boy from a previous marriage. He had little green army men strewn throughout the house and lawn. Those that were so called "lost" weren't actually lost . They were out on assignment, a recon mission for an indefinite period of time. This was about 11 years ago and to this day we can find one or two under the dirt in the front yard.





The story goes:
About a couple of weeks ago my stepson was out with his grandmother shopping at some store somewhere and he came across this package of little green army men. He said he looked at the package and it had a stealth fighter, a helicopter, flags, sandbags and barbed wire fencing in it. Oh, now he never got that in his army men packages before. Hmm, now I recall some 37 odd years ago that I got tanks and planes (no jets) in my packages of army men.
Well he looked at his grandmother and said he wanted a refund for his childhood. His grandmother picked up that package and paid for it unknowingly to him and at the end of the shopping trip, back at home, his grandmother pulled that package out and slapped it on his chest and said here's your childhood refund.
About a week later I was cleaning up around the house (a rare event) and I found these army men with their helicopter, stealth fighter and fencing just laying around under stuff. I said to myself that I should get him to make use out of these things. This is when I heard the story.


I had promptly told him that he should set up a scenario for me to photograph for him. He did with a little bit of reluctance. of course it didn't help that we were teasing him about playing with plastic men. He took it in stride though. And so I proceeded to photograph a series of 15 frames and put it in a package and called it "A Plastic War" The now teenager with his childhood refund was very happy with the results and his refund. The whole series can be viewed on my website.

It took 4 flash and strobes to create the lighting. Two of them had the Cactus V4 receivers by Gadget Infinity, one for the background with a red gel on the left up high, one for white light directly overhead with a snoot, one with a CTB gel in front and right just below the horizon to cast shadows and spill over to the background to create more than one color on the background and one to the left with a CTO gel set about 3 stops darker. Here everything is dark. It is intentional, it sets the right mood for the recon mission and having the front light spill over to the background creates 3 different colors from red to blue. Red being the firefight and bad, blue being the "good" or "homeward bound" (for lack of better descriptions)

As usual please feel free to comment and thanks for looking.
Next week New Jersey (pronounced "Joysey")