This month I spent time visiting the Leatherman's, and brought my TAYU doll with assorted heads to photo.
The Leatherman's live in a beautiful custom home that has some of the best natural lighting I could imagine for photography. Daily sunshine provides ample illumination and the beautiful furniture and larger windows really makes for great photo ops - as does the decor. It's rather rare for me to not use speedlights indoors, and I found using the ample natural ambient light excellent for some shallow light depth of field photos.
I selected one of their wonderful girls to photo alongside mine, and we spent a few minutes posing them to achieve a decent level of realism. I photographed the girls using my DSLR and a new Pixel6 smartphone - which also provided great results due it's great computational photography. I used a higher F-stop to get both models in focus, and manually adjusted settings to achieve great shots.
Their models are really well dressed and I learned some pointers from them like where to find suitable clothing that fits narrow waist dolls, and high quality and realistic wigs. Thus seeing the various dolls they have on display is quite a treat.
Above all, their hospitality, friendship and enthusiasm was fantastic. I will happily return next year for a longer stay!
Below are a few pictures we took. Enjoy
Click on image for full size & gallery
