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Toys on Vacation: Repeat and Improve

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Taking the toys along with you on a vacation has been a thing often discussed here on the SiP blog. Especially during the summer holiday season. I would like to offer a new chapter to add another contribution to the dicussion. Continue reading “Toys on Vacation: Repeat and Improve”

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The Best Thing About Locations

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Some of you may have noticed a small change of style in my recent photos on Instagram and Flickr. Yes, I bought myself an underwater camera and I love it!

The Lego Deep Sea Explorer on a practice mission in the cold waters of a lake somewhere in Finland

Continue reading “The Best Thing About Locations”

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Bring a Friend

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I have liked to bring little friends with me to the trips I’ve made over the past few years. I don’t like to bring too much, usually just a few Lego minifigures, or an action figure or two, not more than I can fit in an old eyeglass case that I can carry around in my pocket. If there’s time and I feel like it, I go for some freewheeling photographs with what I got.

My own favourite is the series of photographs I took with my phone a couple of years ago with an impromptu traveling companion IG-88. That storyline came up unplanned and unfolded by itself and the entire shoot was completely effortless. One shot per day.

Last year it was an Indiana Jones Lego minifigure. There were some nice individual images but no storyline like it was with Iggy.

Anyway, this summer I decided to bring a bigger friend with me to our family trip, bigger than an eyeglass case. My Action Man figure with frogman gear (gear looted from the kid’s stash) was my choice.

I admit, I carried some Lego too.

I was going to do this last year already but I did not have the camera for it and I dropped the idea. It was a mistake because I experienced a spectacular timeless day snorkeling in this beautiful little cove with nobody else in sight but us. It would’ve been a perfect place to shoot.

This time the beach we were in for a few days of our trip was not good for this kind of photography, the waters were not clear and it was all sand. We decided to take a little boat trip to a nearby island for some snorkeling and sure enough, it looked really good for shooting some photographs too. Only, we made some miscalculations with our schedules and when I was about to go for the shoot I realized we had only about an hour before we were supposed to get back to the boat off the island.

I grabbed the Action Man and plunged in with my camera and quickly shot a few dozen exposures while the waves kept ripping the facemask and regulator off of the figure. That ruined a lot of frames but not all of them.

This was a nice catch. I saw those tiny bubbles coming from the air supply and I quickly aimed the camera at the figure hoping it would focus right. It did, but I aimed too high and the feet were cut out. It’s not too bad, though, I kinda like the framing, it works when cropped to a widescreen ratio.

It’s a good start, I think. Yes, a start, because I’m going to go for more as soon as I can. I loved this!