Where "Observe to Preserve" gets even sillier...
I hadn't planned on doing any more pics for the "Observe to Preserve" project, but on a whim I packed the Figure miniature into the camera bag (as it all fits into a compact R.U box in a side pocket) when we went up camping in Northumberland during the summer.
On one of the few beach days we managed (with our usual knack for timing, we missed the heatwave by about three days), we ended up here, which struck me as being very suitable for a miniatures shoot; the natural rock formations are as close to scale cliffs as I was likely to find anywhere.
Something I've tried with the above image; digitally adding an impression of a painting onto the canvas/easel.
The golden sand gave a good impression of desert; sand and rocks are so much easier to scale with the 1/32nd miniature than natural foliage.
Not only was the sand easier to work with, with it being possible to add things like footprints in the sand, but it also gave a nice "Mad Max" post-apocalypse atmosphere to the setting.
Interestingly (if you're a geology nerd like I am) the rocks were crammed full of fossils, mainly corals and sea-plants, and they looked so suitably odd that I really wanted to find a way to incorporate them into the shoot somehow.
This sort of thing was really firing my imagination at this point; the whole concept of the project, that these artists are recording the wold after some catastrophe has occurred, fitted neatly with the imagery of these weird shapes fused into the rocks. Mutated monsters, remains of creatures lying around? Something to work on further anyway...
We returned to this patch of coast again later in the week, and after getting another couple of general shots, I decided to run with the 'monsters' angle inspired by the fossils.
I wanted to try and incorporate some evidence of the various sinkholes/boreholes left by burrowing razor shells and the like, but though the holes in the sand were eye catching, they didn't really stand out prominently in the shots.
The rocks covered in slightly luminous seaweed hinted at nature taking back over, in a strange way, so I took some pics nearer the sea itself.
I tried messing around with the focus, keeping the figure a little blurry in the same way that I did with one of the Tower/Studio shots on the hillside in Wales earlier in the year, and also washed out the colours a bit in post-production.
Whilst I was doing this, The Childs were fishing in the rockpools nearby, and kept finding hermit crabs... which is where the pictures really descended into silliness.
Undoubtedly my favourite early "Dr Who" story is "Genesis of the Daleks" which, amongst all the ancient, wasteland Skaro, unending war, Daleks and Davros goodness, has its moments of silliness... such as the giant mutated Clam monsters which try to eat the Doctor at one point in a cave. I couldn't find a clamshell, but liked the idea of some giant limpet-like, mutated sea creatures existing in this world.
Equally I couldn't get the hermit crab to stay in one place long enough to photograph, but then spotted this very dead crab left behind by something bigger...
...real silliness resulted, I loved the implication that the artist had casually killed off some horrendous, radiation-mutated monstrous sea creature then casually gone about his painting.
Just as the project was getting stale, I think I may have opened up some more avenues to explore with this, shedding a bit more light on the mad world which the "Observe to Preserve" organisation are trying to record. When I did the "Britannia Model Village" project I tried to let the story of the world be told by the background items and imagery, so now I'm wondering if I can expand a bit with this theme in a similar way.
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