Surrender Earthlings

This week, the Sunday Challenge was forced perspective a technique that attempts to manipulate our sense of perception to make us believe something is smaller and/or larger than it actually is.

The old horror films used to use forced perspective and more recently Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy took the technique to new levels.

Now, as I had no desire to appear in my photograph and no willing volunteers were forthcoming I had to go down the model route.

This toy robot, purchased from Boyes in Northallerton specifically for the challenge, is only about 8 inches tall, but I've tried to create the illusion that he is much, much larger.

I set up a small table in my back garden and positioned it about 10 feet away from one of our boundary fences. Then I covered it in fine gravel and added a few small stones before positioning my little intergalactic friend on a piece of wood hidden behind the larger of the stones.

I secured my camera on a tripod and zoomed out to get the smallest focal length possible on my stock lens, as this apparently helps you achieve maximum depth of field. I also tried to ensure I squeezed every inch of DOF possible by using Apperture Priority and selecting f22.

Then I moved the camera and tripod as close as I could get to the table whilst still being able to focus making sure that I was looking up at the model to make him look as big as I could.

I opted to use this shot as I'd positioned everything so as to get the gable end of our neighbour's house into the frame, which I thought that would aid the illusion.

This was the first time I've tried working with forced perspective so I'm fairly pleased with the results and am fairly confident I'll try experimenting with it more in the future.