Making a Balls Up

Following on from my recent chrome cock-up on the satellite customisation, Lewis Morley has responded with some similar problems he experienced, during a model shoot - and shows how the professionals do it!

Looey writes:

"Wotan made a Luna probe out of a chrome Xmas ball and had problems photographing it due to the extreme reflections that created a fish eye lens view of the entire room around it. While this may be of benefit to CGI surveyors trying to capture environments for their Visual Effects work, it's a killer for model photography! I mentioned I'd had similar problems creating a book cover last year and he expressed interest in seeing it.

So here's my photographic cover for Gillian Polack's novel "Poison and Light" a story set on another planet in the future which is going through a very thorough Georgian revival. All the futuristic buildings are in the process of being remodeled to look like the 18th Century and all the inhabitants wear historical attire.

The spacecraft are advanced interstellar vehicles and a chrome sphere seemed like a good idea. It's only a background item, so I made it out of a chrome ball, carefully scribed and minutely scuffed to give a feeling of scale with a torch reflector embedded for the engine.

I climbed onto my roof to photograph it with a natural sky, but me, the camera and the entire suburb around me were also visible, requiring a lot of Photoshop work to fix!

The rest of the buildings are laser cut cardboard at about 1/50 scale. The foreground figures are sculpted from poly clay and are about 1/25 scale.

 I hope these work in progress photos give you a good idea of the work involved."

Thanks Looey, amazing model work!