Mini-Shoot: Cotton Candy Girls

[GreysPrincess]

Did an indoor mini-photoshoot with the cotton-candy-haired girls tonight. I'm still not very good at taking indoor photos with my DSLR; my camera always wants a longer eosure due to the lower light for them and I struggle to get them in focus. The result was that I took photos of several other poses and only these turned out. (I'm also convinced it's not actually saving all the photos I take, but I could just be crazy on that one...) On the plus side I figured out I had my white balance on the wrong setting for indoors today so maybe I'll find a setting that can help me with this issue too in the future.



My custom girl by ShortyBoo, who I purchased at PUDDLE this year. She's been dubbed Circe, and is Marty's cousin.





Marty ran back into her while they were both in Chicago, and now Circe's here (permanently) visiting Marty's home.



Changed to some fun casual attire.



Getting the other cotton candy girls in for what Marty is jokingly referring to as their album cover shoot. Nemo you'll recognize; the other Pullip is actually my roommate's (and I can now officially say my goal to secretly drag her into this hobby has been achieved!) She's calling her Chelsea Chesterton, which is a semi-joking reference to her, ahem, ample bosom. I need to get a decent photo of her faceup but the ones I took tonight didn't turn out; it has the look and feel of a stock faceup but I can't for the life of me ID it. If anyone can tell from this picture please let me know! EDIT: It was bothering me again so I started looking around again and I finally figured it out. She's Cosmic Jupi.)



I do also have a bait head that will eventually be becoming a cotton-candy-haired girl, and she wanted in on the fun too, disembodied head or not. The faceup you see here is not what she's keeping, but the wig and eyechips are.

...Yeah, I definitely have a dolly "type."

[Alliecat]

What a colourful bunch! Having met Marty, I'm happy to see she now has a cousin Looks like they'll be having lots of fun together.
I'm not crazy about indoor shooting either. Does your camera have a white balance for indoors, or "auto"? Auto might be the best choice depending on what kind of lighting you have -- incandescent vs. fluorescent etc.; you do have to match the lighting type.
(I miss film... I never had to mess with fifty million settings before I took a picture. It was so simple...)

Have you got a tripod? Or even something solid you could rest the camera on? Helps with blur. If the camera will let you you can set it for shorter eosures but then you'll lose depth of field if it compensates that way... That's where the tripod is helpful because you can have as long an eosure as you want if it's sturdy.

Anyway, nice to see these girls and I hope to see more of their adventures
Oh, and yay for dolly-enabling your roommate

[Rexicorn]

Lovely photos; I adore the wigs. So colourful!

[MapleLeaf]

You have a beautiful group of girls!
Colourful and very sweet!

[Cornflower Blue]

Love all that pastel goodness!

[GreysPrincess]

Thanks guys!

Alliecat, I don't have a tripod yet but I definitely need to get one! I had my white balance set on "incandescent" for this one; I may try auto next time. And I didn't realize eosure length could affect depth of field; good to know!

[Alliecat]

Alliecat, I don't have a tripod yet but I definitely need to get one! I had my white balance set on "incandescent" for this one; I may try auto next time. And I didn't realize eosure length could affect depth of field; good to know!

It doesn't affect it, exactly. But they are related.
For a given shot, you are letting "X" amount of light into the camera.
The things that affect how much light gets in, are a) how wide your aperture is, and b) how long the shutter is open.
Aperture (the size of the hole in the lens that the light goes through) affects your depth of field. That's the "f" number on the camera. The smaller the f number, the bigger the hole is -- so f3.5 is a bigger opening than f8, for example -- and lets in more light. AND, the smaller the f number, the LESS depth of field you get. So you will get less of the depth of the scene in focus at f3.5 than you will at f8. If you're shooting something fairly flat, you can go with a small f stop number and small depth of field. If you have, say, an outdoor scene and you want as much into the background in focus as possible, you want to use a bigger f-stop number, say f22, which will give you more depth of field.
BUT, aperture and shutter speed are reciprocal -- if you need "X" amount of light for a good eosure... if you reduce one of those things, you have to increase the other.
So if you use a small f-number (big aperture) you are letting in a lot more light, so to keep from over-eosing, you've got to shorten your shutter speed. If you use a bigger f number for more depth of field, say f22, that little hole lets in way less light than, say, f4. So to keep from undereosing, you have to make the shutter speed longer. The "right" amount of light makes the best eosure, and you adjust each of those settings to keep the right amount of light going into the camera. More light for a shorter time = less light for a longer time.
Does that make sense so far...?
It was so much simpler with film, where the camera had a set series of f-stops, and you knew how many stops you were changing, but with digicams it seems really random, and there are a lot of partial-stop settings. The camera figures this out, but I find the numbers just weird.
Once you "get" the reciprocity thing, you can compensate for low light or depth of field by changing one setting or the other. Sometimes you want a small DOF because you want an out-of-focus background. Sometimes you want the whole scene in focus.
Having greater DOF will help if you don't get the focus exactly on the point you need -- most of the doll will still be adequately in focus.
So if you have some low light indoors, and you want all of your dolls in focus, you need to use a small aperture for that greater DOF... but that means you need a longer eosure to let enough light into the camera. And that's where the tripod comes in. With a solid tripod you can use a really small aperture, get really deep depth of field, and set an eosure for, say, half a second, or a whole second, or whatever, that you couldn't hand-hold and have it sharp.
OMG, didn't realize long that got; sorry. I hope some of that helps. Definitely keep shooting!
(And if you had only incandescent lamps on, your colour balance should've been OK. Was there daylight from a window too? The camera should be able to manage with "auto".)

[Offgenemi]

Cotton girls are adorable !!! I feel like they should fight crimes while looking cute they look fierce

[GreysPrincess]

Cotton girls are adorable !!! I feel like they should fight crimes while looking cute they look fierce

Haha, that would be cute!

Alliecat, thanks for the excellent elanation! That's definitely helpful; I still feel like I'm really new to photography and I don't know what I'm doing a lot of the time! I'll keep all that in mind when I'm doing my next pictures indoors.

I do think a window might have been affecting the white balance; there's one not too far away from where I was shooting, and the blinds were shut, but there still very well could have been light coming through. I did a few more pictures the other morning before I saw your response and I did part of it with the same white balance setting, and part of it on auto, but all with a couple other setting changes that seemed to help them turn out a bit better. Just gotta keep practicing to improve, right?