I doubt anyone noticed, but I missed a couple weeks’ worth of posts while I moved from my apartment into a new house. I’m still very much in that “settling in” period and all of my figures are still packed, but I feel like I have enough time again to resume blogging regularly.

This week, I wanted to share the results of my first foray into outdoor figure photography. On a recent trip to see family, I decided to take Good Smile Company’s 1/8 scale Canaan and my camera along for the ride to see what kind of results I could get outside of my usual shooting environment. Overall, I was rather pleased with the results.

Shooting outdoors is nice in that you don’t have to supply a background and the lighting mostly takes care of itself, although direct sunlight produced poor results.  On the other hand, you have extra considerations–like wind–that you don’t have to worry about indoors. It was actually windy enough while I was taking these photos that I could see the figure rocking back and forth slightly in my camera’s live view mode.

In addition to moving the photo shoot outdoors, I experimented here with using a narrower depth of field than I’ve typically used up to now to create the blurry background effect. I also discovered that using my camera’s live view mode to zoom in on an area of interest, such as Canaan’s eyes, allowed me to fine tune the focus with greater accuracy than using the viewfinder.