"One Person's Trash........" Props for Photographs

It's been ages since I've written anything for my blog so this post is long overdue. The last few months have just been so hectic that writing had unfortunately slipped to the back of the priority queue. Thankfully things are now starting to balance out; we've moved and settled in to our new house, my studio space is operational (yay!) and I have something that resembles an internet connection..... remember dial-up? Well my broadband is only marginally faster and probably less reliable....but you can't have everything right? :) Anyway before I go into an apoplectic rant about download speeds... I'm going to get on with this post.

You'll have heard the expression "one person's trash is another person's treasure". As photographers it's a saying that we should be particularly fond of. Finding props for photographs can be a challenge, Ebay is a great place to look for sure, you can find all manner of crap quality new and used merchandise on the well know auction site but it's hard to beat seeing something first hand.  So in addition to searching online I love to have a good rummage at a car boot sale and that's exactly where the chair you see in the image below came from.

It's actually a little dolls chair, about 12 inches high but it had the perfect aged and beaten look that i needed for this image and it cost me the grand total of £1.50. Absolute bargain!

The image itself was really pretty simple. The chair was shot on grey seamless just using a single gridded spot from camera right, all the textures on the background and the dust effect were added in post. So there you have it, low-budget, minimal equipment and because it's a miniature prop you could literally shoot this in the corner of a room on a table top.

Hope you like it and remember; "one person's trash......."  Never drive past a car boot sale again!

Thanks Darren