#stuckinplastic: The Exhibition

Our very first picture we posted here on Stuck In Plastic.

 
One of our goals here at Stuck In Plastic (#stuckinplastic) is to create opportunities to show toy photography away from a computer or hand held device and place it squarely on the walls of fellow fans, board rooms, coffee shops and galleries alike.

To that end I am pleased to announce the very first Stuck In Plastic exhibition which we just branded for now #stuckinplastic: The Exhibition.

My friends +Me2, Avanaut and I will be showing our collective works - large, and we mean large- at the Bryan Ohno Gallery in Seattle, USA, Planet Earth for five weeks starting March 5th, 2015.

And yes we want YOU to come and celebrate our very first art exhibition in my hometown with us.

In fact if you are able to make the opening we will all three be in attendance (yes, these two Nordic dudes are coming over to this side of the pond).

Showing my work with these two gentleman is a sincere honor, and the additional opportunity to meet them...well lets just say 2015 is looking very bright indeed.

We will be talking about this exhibition periodically between now and March 5th as our plans take shape and offcourse we are interested in your views, so stay tuned !

I hope you will take time out of your busy schedule and meet up with us for the opening reception on the 5th (or at least help us spread the word). It would be wonderful to turn this into a mini meet up and show the world and beyond (or at least Seattle for now) that we are a force to be reckoned with.

My sincere hope is that this is a grand success so that we can travel #stuckinplastic: The Exhibition to a town near you, add a few more members, and continue to grow this movement.

~ xxsjc

If you would like more information about this, or future exhibitions, please let us know. 
Have you signed up for the Best of 2014 Photographic Challenge? If not, sign up here!

Who's Your Stuart?

I've received the most wonderful feedback on my photographs over the years. All, and I mean all feedback has been supportive and positive and it makes me very happy. I've been very lucky with this, I know.

There's one particular comment that I have kept in my heart because, having been in Flickr for just a few months by the time, it just took my breath away. I keep a screengrab of it on my desktop as a reminder of the fact that you never know who's out there. Here, take a look:

I do not know who or where Stuart is, I can only hope he had a great time with his Lego. Stuart is often on my mind when I write the little stories to my photographs, for me he's forever ten years old and you can't write just anything to a ten year old. This is why you do not find sex, violence or foul language in my photostreams. There is a certain amount of responsibility that comes with a Stuart, I try to keep that in mind at all (upload)times.

But, you know, that is just my Stuart. Do you have a Stuart?

A Freezing Cold Gathering

A "wampaweekend" took place last weekend, it was another in a series of events created by a bunch of guys over at Instagram. The events are about toyphotographs and they take place on certain days with certain themes which are announced a few weeks before the events take place. The ethos on these events is refreshing, there are no judges, no points or rewards, it's not a contest. It's purely about having some fun with a pre-designated theme. You can determine the level of the challenge yourself, but you still won't win anything.

This one got started from a joke I made on a photo a few weeks ago. Some of the events were just one day long and I made a humorous remark that a full weekend would be bigger. I threw in the wampa because it rhymed with weeked. To my surprise, the guys took the joke on and invited me to be a guest host.

I've never really participated much on things like these, but this is different. I like the angle on these particular events very much (as in "no contest"), it should encourage all people to participate, young and old. If you have access to a camera and something even close to the theme in question to shoot, you're good to go. When the subject is so close to what I think dearly of (snow and Hoth), a world I've visited frequently with my camera, how could I ever refuse an invitation like this? In fact, it was an honor.

The weekend was a lot of fun and there were a good number of wampa photographs. I was told this was the biggest event yet. You can see them with the hashtag #wampaweekend on Instagram.

You might also like to check out the feeds of these Instagrammers for past and future events: @smokebelch2, @east_mountain, @brett_wilson and @zenith_ardor.

Oh, yes, I'm there, too: @avanaut.

The Long Road to a Finished Photo

I am guilty of looking back from time to time. No, I am not the type of guy who only listens to old music because new stuff supposedly sucks, you know those guys, what I mean is that I have a hard time letting some of my photographs go. I return to them from time to time and re-edit them to see if the original edit can be improved. It may be just a little thing with colours, maybe with how the image has been cropped or just tweaks in contrasts and exposure. In the most extreme case it was a shoot, then a re-shoot, after that a re-edit of the re-shoot before I called it done. This took four years.

Editing photos from RAW is also not just about knowing the techniques, it's also about choices. Sometimes I didn't really succeed in either of those. There are things in the process I did not know how to do just a couple of years ago, and these little discoveries can make a big difference with certain photographs.

I do this because I want to learn, not because I do not like what I have done originally. By editing the same image again after a while I get a second chance with something I already know; on the second take I know what to look for. Somehow I feel this helps me to understand the editing process better than editing something entirely new. It's like practising to play a musical instrument by playing the same song again and again.

I don't replace the originals to the newly edited, but if there is a significant difference, I may post it again.

This one I posted again, "The Call of the Wild" (a nod to Jack London stories). The original on the right (from March 2011) is almost straight from the camera with very little edits, a tighter crop being the most obvious one. The one on the left has a new crop (or, rather, isn't cropped at all), the composition allows the image to breathe a little, the colours are more vivid and I dug the wampa out of the shadows. Now, after three years, I think this image is finally done.

To Edit or not to Edit

How far will you go to fake your photos? That is a question I have asked myself quite a few times in the past few years. I started my toy photography thing with the noble idea of not making any changes to my photos after they were exposed in-camera, barring some colour and contrast tweaks. It was a challenge, a rule, I set for myself to make this more fun. I held on to that rule for quite a long time. It led to many discoveries—figuring out ways to create, say, a sun in the sky or rays of light in the air without adding them in Photoshop. I experimented a long time to get these things right in-camera and had quite a lot of fun with it.

Gradually, over the past couple of years, I have been slipping on the rule. After doing some commercial photography work, I realized that I will not die if I make things a little easier for myself from time to time. I still wouldn't add a sun in a post, but I began editing photos more liberally. Nothing exotic, not yet anyway.

You know those beautiful, heavily edited photographs that leave nothing to hope for, perfect in every way? I think they're fantastic, yet I find myself admiring the simple unfiltered photo just as well. While a technical brilliance can leave me in awe, a simple straight photo can be emotionally much more rewarding. This is true whether or not I’m photographing toys.

Now, the question "how far are you going to fake your photos?" lingers in my mind as I am starting work on something new. Does heavy editing make the photos closer to being perfect – or just generic? Is editing killing something in the photos? Is it like in the music business: would you use Autotune to sing better than you actually can?

Of Mirrors and Images

I've never been much of a community guy. In the past, I preferred to work alone, especially when it came to something marginal, which photographing toys was to me. At the beginning of my toy photography career in the summer of 2009, I reluctantly joined a couple of Flickr groups because I was curious. I wanted to see how it all worked. Then I joined several more.

Strangers’ comments to my first few uploaded photographs puzzled me, as I didn't really know how to respond. It felt weird – and interesting. I did not go away, however, and gradually the toy photography community in Flickr grew on me. It happened quite fast actually, after I realized the community served as mirror with which I could see myself.

As I post a photo, the response it generates helps me to figure out what I did right and what went wrong. I am blind to most of my photographs; I have no idea of how they work, how people perceive them. I work on a whim. Usually, when I upload something I think is absolute dynamite, I get a friendly reaction, but not the enthusiasm I'd expected. It goes the other way too; images I think are meh at best, not necessarily worth uploading at all, get the most likes. The toy photography community mirror is important to me. I learn from it.

When Shelly asked me to join SiP I hesitated at first, but after some consideration I decided to jump in. Why? I wanted another mirror, a mirror I have not yet experienced: a mirror of a text, without the photo as the obvious lead.

We'll see.

~ Avanaut

This is from my first photosession with Lego. Well, first with uploading in mind.

170 degrees

This is post 170 since our very first post in February of this year.

The first post featuring Shelly landing on unexplored shores in Nordic countries.
A post quickly followed by our second post where Shelly explained we are an art collective, continued with a rollercoaster of other posts.
An average of 20 posts a month.

A journey of posts exploring our own artistic selves, looking for influences and the reasons why we shoot what we shoot and are what we are.

Stuckinplastic is more than just a hashtag on Instagram or the random ramblings from Shelly and Me2. Stuckinplastic is looking to define an art collective of like minded photographers, digital illustrators, story tellers and visual artists alike who want to take their work beyond the instant gratification of likes on IG, Flickr, FB or any of the social media we all crave once in a while and share a common goal, passion and understanding.

We want to take our plastic work into the printed walls of galleries, board and bedrooms alike and connect with our audience.

Define our bricked photography as the soup cans of our age.

Stuck In Plastic is not an easy or fast road, it is not an instant movement of the next great picture or awesome effect that blasts us all away like a genie in a bottle of soda.

It is not about the gear, the bricks or the tricks of the trade.
It is about all of that and yet it is soo much more.
It is about finding our artistic selves and meeting new people.
 
Sometimes we ask too much questions or dive too deep.

It is a long and windy road and we are just at the beginning of this great journey.

A journey you are all part of.

From being a distant reader who enjoys our posts, to some of you walking along and helping define the soup cans with us here on IG and G+ or giving us guidance by walking ahead and being an inspiration for all of us as a distant legend.

We are extremely proud to welcome our third member of the inner circle of the order of the soup cans here at Stuck In Plastic.

A member who doesn't need any long and windy introductions.

Welcome Avanaut.

Pluto

Pluto Explorations

What better to do on a Sunday afternoon than taking a hitchhike across our Universe and enjoy a brisk walk into the deep snow blizzards of Pluto.

While Pluto is considered a dwarf planet I did not bump into Fredo, his Middle Earth Companions or any of Snow White Seven Friends but was reminded of another Legend when facing the snowflakes.

A Legend that has been exploring the snowy fields of Hoth long before I got suited up and embraced the ice cold planes of Pluto.

A Legend who has many young Padawans out there looking to step in his footsteps and become the Master one day  ...

Was I trying to be one of the young Padawans today when I took this #selfie out in the deep snow ?
Did I seek the glory and fortune some has looked before ?
Was I acting like a copy cat ?
Or did I just took a selfie in the snow ?

Most interesting questions one asks himself when out and about in the ice cold and temperatures are truly below zero (on yet another planet owned by another Big Inc, not the one of the ice cold zero drinks).

A question our Legend himself asked as well not that long ago.

It seems we are all about questions these days ...

Questions on how we are defining us as being stuck in plastic, one snowflake at a time ...

Me2

Past, Present and Future ...

Exposition Universelle - Paris 1900

What started off as an innocent question on why we are shooting plastic has turned into a deep dive of old dinosaur emotions and recognition of our roots and influences. Most probably we will also be taking a little detour back to the future before we are done.

The Eiffel Tower for sure laid the foundations for the "Mechanics Made Easy" play sets found in 1901 and must have played an inspirational role in why some of our LEGO bricks contain holes in the middle.

Nobel prize winner Sir Harry Kroto actually goes as far as blaming the UK railway failures on the younger generation growing up with plastic (read LEGO) instead of perforated metal (read Mecanno).

We don't want to turn this into an epic discussion of which toy is best (remember those epic Nikon vs Canon discussions) but stay on the why we are shooting plastic.

Do we look for capturing that perfect simple plastic smile?
Do we want to create epic movie scenes in our own cellar ?
Do we ...

We will continue to search for the why, in our past, our present and our future ...

Shooting plastic, one brick at a time ...

Me2

Avanaut

"The First Attempt" by Avanaut

Why do I take photographs of Lego? That is a question that took me by surprise a couple of weeks ago. I realized I had never asked myself that question before. Finding the answer was not easy, and it took a brief conversation with my wife for me to see it.

I am photographing Lego because I am a never-was movie director making a living outside the movie industry. That's what my wife said, and it pretty much sums it up. See, I always loved movies. Star Wars, obviously, was huge, but many others as well, classics and contemporary. As a kid I made some movies myself with my dad's Super-8 film camera, but film was expensive and my dad did not allow me to hack the camera's filmport to produce a widescreen format picture. My movies were not very good; a widescreen wouldn't have improved them, but still. I would build miniature sets and models to shoot, but the miserable camera could not focus on anything, since it had no macro. I grew up watching great movies and reading all about them. As a teenager I subscribed to Starlog, Cinemagic, and Cinefantastique. Cinefex, Premiere and Empire came along a little later. I'm soaked with that stuff; it's in my DNA. I sometimes dream in 2.39:1.

That was a long time ago.

When I stumbled into photographing Lego Star Wars in 2009, I quickly connected to those times when I dreamed of making movies. I soon incorporated into the photos many of the cinematic ideas I had toyed with in my youth: widescreen, smoke, aerial particles, snow, blizzards, tight closeups and stories -- the short stories that I like to write to go with the photos. I think this through via cinema; even my "Leftovers & Alternatives" album in Flickr is allegoric to a DVD "deleted scenes" extra. Lego is a perfect medium for all this. It's playful, and there's so much to choose from. You can have a minifigure on a piece of a coloured paper and still make a strong photo with that; yet there's everything from a coffee cup to the Death Star to add, if you like.

This soon became a sort of creativity outlet, a free turf to express ideas I could not use in my day job as an illustrator. I see my photographs as single-frame plays I can write, produce, direct and shoot, but with characters and concepts I grew up with. In a way, I'm exploring an unfulfilled career path, but with Lego and present day tools, like the DSLR camera. It's old but it's new. It's perfect!

~ Vesa Lehtimäki

"Breaking in the Tauntaun (Revised & Rejected) by Avanaut 

"Last Ship to Rendezvous Point" by Avanaut

Toy Photography…an incomplete history

I was talking with my toy photo buddy Bricksailboat yesterday about the history of toy photography. We have both tried to research this topic and have found there is very little information about this movement on the internet. I thought that now is a good time to start pooling our knowledge and writing a brief history of toy photography.

What began as a few people posting images onto Flickr (and more recently onto Instagram) has grown into a huge world wide community of toy collectors and photographers sharing and supporting their passion. I have heard more times than I can count the experience of some new member of the community say that when they came to Instagram and discovered that there were already people taking photographs, how happy they were to know they weren't alone.

It has taken social media to bring these very far flung, disparate people together to feed off each others energy and grow this community into what we see today. Lately this movement seems to be taking on a life of it's own. I see other photographers, like myself, showing their work in galleries. Most recently Zahir Batin who will be exhibiting his excellent storm trooper pics in Malaysia. I truly wish him well because his success is all of our success.

I remember the first images that I saw that showed me what the possibilities could be. These were by Vesa Lehtimäki, better known as Avanaut. Since Vesa has been shooting toys since 2009 I like to think of him as one of the founding fathers of our movement.

But toy photography is not only a social media phenomenon. There is already a variety of photographers showing their toy photography in the more traditional art world like Brian McCarthy. His Art-Toys and War-Toys books are incredible.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of people all over the world using toys to express themselves and create amazing art. I look forward to continuing my research and seeing who else is out there.

~ xxsjc

Who was your inspiration to take it to the next level?
I'd like to start a list of influential toy photographers, who should be on it?

image by Vesa Lehtimäki