As I mentioned last week, the 52 Weeks theme for this week was Winnie the Pooh.

So I decided to try and do a portrait shoot with my two little WtP characters. Not easy as they are only 3cm tall, but I did buy some small LED lights on adjustable bendy wires recently (with food/ product photography in mind) and they were ideal as small light sources for these portraits.

I tried to stick to the same lighting theory as you would with full size portraits. My first set up, with a single light above and camera left, was designed to get what is known as Rembrandt lighting, where a face is lit from one side but with a small spill of light onto the opposite cheek to form a small triangle. The two shots above are the results with Pooh and Piglet.

Then I changed the background for white and set up a two-light shot with a similar key light illuminating most of the front, Pooh was turned slightly more into the light, and some light bounced off the shiny white paper. A second hair light (or should that be fur light) was added behind the subject camera right to light the right side and ears and give separation from the background. The shot above was the result.

This was good fun and afterwards I had a few ideas on how to create a mini softbox and snoot for the LEDs – so if I get a bit of spare time I might this again with some ‘light modifiers’.

I also visited another photo exhibition last week and took some shots around the empty office building as I was looking at the photos. This was the best of them;

Finally, I got myself a new gadget. I’ve upgraded my phone to the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact. All the reviews indicate that this is one of the best – if not THE best camera available on a smartphone so it was an obvious choice for me as an Android user. 23MP images and 4K video – what’s not to like?

First impressions are that the quality is excellent. I’ll write a more detailed review once I’ve had some time to play with it.