This was my first foray into macro photography and, considering how much I knew about the subject to start with (zero), I think it went pretty well.

The chick and bunny are (obviously) Peeps, and the trees are Peeps too (and, in fact, should be available now, if last year was any indication). I amde the landscape out of styrofoam and covered it in that “snow batting” that you can get at Michael’s (Note: if you want to do something like this in Sept., you’d probably better squirrel some snow stuff away now, ’cause it’s pretty hard to find in autumn).

A few months ago I saw someone making some sculpture thing out of styrofoam on the Carol Duvall show, and she pointed out that you could use styrofoam to “sand” styrofoam and get nicely shaped pieces. While “sanding” my landscape, I discovered that styrofoam “sawdust” looks a lot like snow, so that’s what I sprinkled around the base of the trees and the feet (?) of the bunny and chick.

The backdrop is just a piece of scrapbooking paper printed with clouds, leaned up against the windsheild of my MINI (which, as it turns out, makes a great base for macro photography).

I had to tinker with it quite a bit in photoshop, as the manufacturing of Peeps is not a precision process, and my choices for main characters were either wildly deformed, but with perfectly placed eyes, or shapely, but crazy-eyed. I went with the shapely ones and then moved their eyes in Photoshop. I also had to do a lot of retouching on the trees, both manually (invovling scissors and re-application of green sugar) and in Photoshop (making the ornaments look right and replacing ones where the icing had fallen off — these trees were 8 months old by the time I got around to this!).

Then, of course, there was the color tweaking, etc. etc. I had the paper ones printed at CafePress and then made the e-version from those.

Whew.