Try It Toosday: Finger Puppets

It's time for another Try It Toosday! The day I attempt to recreate a photograph that caught my eye. This is the final photo recreation needed to complete my 21 Goals in 2021.

It's just a couple fingers with facial features drawn in Sharpie, and hair scribbled in the editing process, right? Super simple.

Not.

Here's my (older, wrinklier fingered) version:

Here's my inspiration photo. I don't know the name of the photographer. The image caught my eye in February of 2012. I've been toting this around for nearly a decade!

In all honesty, I had two more complex photos in mind for my final #tryittoosday attempt. The first photo, saved in 2007, is a garden where all the flowers are balloons. I bought all the supplies and made some test "flowers." I even lined up some help with blowing up balloons! But my yard isn't big enough ... and I'd have to borrow some kids (which is hard to do in a pandemic). This idea is on hold. I still might find a way to use those 100 balloons.

The second is a box covered in woven lines of toilet paper. There are a lot of tricky parts to this photo. In my analysis, I recognized toilet paper that tears far too easily, to very specific and stark lighting, to figuring out that the photo was very likely flipped 180 degrees in the editing process. I got about half way through the construction of this photo before I gave up. It's a wickedly cool photo by Nick Albertson!

As I worked on trying to recreate these wonderful images, the difficulty factor kept increasing exponentially. If I learned anything this year by doing this project, it's the ingenuity of the original photographers. Even simple photos like the one I did today are more difficult and take hours longer to recreate than you'd think! 

Gathering the supplies, crafting and construction, getting the correct angles for the composition, proper backgrounds and lighting, photographing, and editing all take time. The brain energy that goes into trying to figure out the original photographer's process can be enough wattage to light an entire city. I've thought about several of these photographs for months before attempting to make them. 

It's an excellent exercise. I can recommend it to other photographers that want to test their skills and learn a lot along the way.

I admit, though, that I'm glad I challenged myself to only twenty-one photos!