Monthly Featured Photographer - September 2016

Jasmyn and Sasha

Hi all, I am Mishka, well you know, from the Doll Forum. I think you know me by my pictures and funny tutorial videos. Well, I thought it would be great to be a featured photographer here on CoverDoll. My wife and I live in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and as you can imagine, it’s a photographers paradise. We had a lovely home built there by a regionally famous architect there, and you can see some of that featured in my pictures. The house is all natural redwood construction with a deck overlooking the mountains. I love collecting things made by locals, and my wife loves collecting art as well, and I often feature her collectables in many pictures. The porcelain chickens in the pictures are part of her collection, but the dolls are mine!

For this photo-shoot I decided on photographing two of my dolls – my lovely Joy Model 142 (JM142) known as Jasmyn, and the WM140, I call Sasha, a very popular doll here. On the photographic side of things, I use a full frame Nikon D750 with a very popular 28-75 portrait lens, that makes pictures so lifelike. I also employ a studio for the picture taking, and have a number of studio lights. Although I take many portraits inside, I try to use as much natural light as possible. I incorporate white balance, ISO, aperture priority, spot-focus, a good tripod in all parts of my doll photos, and this helps getting super nice and sharp pictures, but I have to admit, creativity and luck are 90% of the mojo behind getting great pics.

I dressed up Sasha in a school outfit which I had to find at various shops. Jasmyn was dressed as a Hooter’s Waitress, and her outfit was found on the internet as well. I think both are lovely and are just so much fun photographing. In this feature, Jasmyn suffered a broken knee joint, which rather quickly ended the photo session. I since then fixed her leg, and here you can see the rest of her photos. Well that’s all I have for the intro, and I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I did taking them.

Mishka