Flights of Fancy

Tobias M. Schiel10 Comments

Toy photography and flights of fancy: it almost seems like a defining combination. Wouldn‘t it be nice to just have a huge wall with a couple of tiny windows and a backlit „Tickets“ sign? Then I could show a long line of people waiting to get one. And can I translate the jazz music played at a concert into a picture?

Flights of fancy indeed, and when I build these 1/87 scale dioramas or set up scenes, it often seems like they will remain just that. Other times, things turn out quite well (if not always the way I would have expected). These two pictures are from my jazz series. The titles are Broadway Blues and Jumpin’ at the Woodside, after the respective songs composed by Ornette Coleman and Count Basie.

Treasure Hunt?

Tobias M. Schiel6 Comments

This week’s contribution for the Lens-Artists’s Challenge #219: Treasure Hunt: two reflections. Originally hunting for a picture that would somewhat illustrate the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and be photographed through things (for yet another challenge), I first tried what I could do with this figure and a glass vase. The pictures turned out to be nothing like what I’d had in mind. However, I came to like these ‘test’ pictures better than the one actually showing “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” through a piece of cellophane. So always hold on to your test shots! They may turn out to be treasures you found without immediately realizing.

The Thirsty Ear

Tobias M. Schiel2 Comments
(JD Allen)

“Minton’s was just a place for cats to jam. People didn’t pay too much attention to what was going on, I mean the people there that weren’t musicians. So when you went in, you’d see cats half-stewed who weren’t paying much mind to what was happening on stage. But the musicians were.” Carmen McRae

Urban Environments

Tobias M. Schiel13 Comments
Take The ‘A’ Train (Billy Strayhorn)

As I go through my pictures of miniature scenes, I find one commen denominator: urban environments. I obviously find myself drawn to urban settings, to the world of alleys, bars, theaters, and public transportatiou. Here’s a retrospective celebrating the city and its lights (and shadows) in H0 scale.

While the vehicles and figures (and the phone booth) come from the toy store, the buildings are custom made, mostly from scratch.

Boats … and Automobiles

Tobias M. Schiel4 Comments

The Alster Fleet in Hamburg – these boats are waiting to take tourists around on the river Alster, as I was surprised to find out when we visited a couple of years ago. Because I remember that when I was a boy, we used to hop on these boats to get from A to B, with this very fleet servicing the waterways like any other public transportation. For us kids, it was great fun to take the boat when we went visiting relatives.

However, since this week’s Lens Artists’ Challenge specifically asked for Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, here’s a picture with autos…

April in Paris

Tobias M. Schiel3 Comments

The picture above, named after a song by Vernon Duke, is part of my Jazz series. I asked myself if the situation was too surreal, but then I saw the Lens Artists’ challenge, which is Surrealism. And I decided this amount of surrealism was all right. After all, the fun of working with toys is that you can push everything towards Surrealism as much as you like.

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