JD Hancock Photos

Berry Hard Work Setup (3/11)

This is the third part of a series describing the setup of the photo Berry Hard Work.

The Little Dudes

You might think that positioning the little dudes is easy. Many times, it is. This time, it was not.

I recently purchased some of the figures in this photo and had never used them before. In fact, they were sealed up in their packaging until a few minutes before I started setting up the scene. Unfortunately, when I pulled them out of their packaging, I discovered that three of them were broken.

1. The Headless Ax Man. He sounds like a horror movie villain, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The man standing in front of the strawberry had lost his head. So I grabbed some glue and stuck it back on. I let it sit for a few minutes, and he was fine. It was not that big a deal.

2. The Disarmed Wheelbarrow Man. His problem was a little more difficult to solve. His arms were attached to the wheelbarrow, which is good, but they were not attached to his body, which is bad. Again, I applied a little glue, but getting him into a position where the glue could do its thing was a bit of a challenge. His arms kept falling off of the bottom of his white shirt. Finally, after many failed attempts, I found a position where both arms would stay attached to his shirt, and I left him alone to heal. But if you look closely in the final photo, you can see that his right arm still isn’t quite 100% attached to his shirt.

3. The One-Armed Dolly Man. What started off as a nightmare ended up as the silver lining. I always knew I would have this guy in front of the wheelbarrow man, with the dolly just out of view so that you might think it’s another wheelbarrow full of strawberry bits. What I didn’t know is that his right arm was detached from his body at the shoulder, and his left hand was not attached to the dolly at all. That sounds bad, and it was bad, until I discovered that this figure was poorly balanced, and had he been intact, he would have fallen over time and time again. However, since I was gluing him back together, I could choose how best to position his arm such that the dolly would help prop up his ill-designed body. And because I knew I was positioning him in profile, his left arm obscured by his right, it didn’t matter if his left hand was attached to the dolly or not. And so, as you might be able to see in this setup photo, I didn’t bother trying to fix his left hand. I just angled his right arm, and by extension the dolly, to ensure that this poor guy could stand up. And it worked!