You are free to give the houses the look you like. The only requirements are:
you must be able to bring it with you
you must be able to put it together in the field
the hose must be (partly) finished so it can be photographed form the outside
the house must be possible to open (at least one of the walls, or remove the roof) and (partly) decorated at the inside, in order to take photographs from the "inside" and out through a window or door
The houses are going to be photographed in ways that make them appear to be part of the landscape in Fyksesund. We will try to do it all "in camera", but it may also be possible to do some digital manipulation afterwards.
When photographing a small object you will probably experience challenges with depth of field. In some cases a blurred background, as seen below, is a wanted effect. However, we would like to keep our house in focus and at the same time see the landscape as clear as possible. Using the camera on your smartphones will probably be the best option, because a small sensor and a wide angled lens will create a larger depth of field.
If you have problems with getting the house in focus: This is where you have move a little bit further away from the house.
Keep you camera low! This is where you will have to get down on the ground. The idea is that the camera should be placed at the height of the eyes of a person with the same scale as the house. So if your model of the house is 20 cm, and the house would have been 6 meters (600 centimeters) in reality, you will hav the scale 1:30. If the eyes of a real person are approximately 150 cm over the ground, then your camera has to be 5 cm above the ground to keep the scale right.
The work this week relates to the field trip to Fyksesund. We are going to make foldable houses out of cardboard. Foldable because you are going to bring them with you to the field trip nest week.
The house models are to be placed and photographed in the landscape.
The houses can be made of several parts, but you will have to be able to put it in a plastic bag and then in a rucksack and make it complete in the field, with simple means.
http://little-people.blogspot.com/
If you use a camera that gives you more control, you should keep the aperture as small (larger number) as possible and use a wide angle lens.
Do experiment! There are for example a number of apps that let you create cinemagraphs – small images sequences, like movies.
How the light falls on you model can really change the image significantly. The first seconds of this video illustrates it perfectly. There is also some insight on depth of field in the same film.
What happens when a shadow falls on a part of the house?
What can you do with strong light, like from a torch, from one direction?
Have you something that can reflect the sunlight?
etc
It will not be like you can put your house up anywhere. There has to be a suitable foreground, which you can create, and the desired background, given by the landscape. There are lots of things you can bring into the foreground. Look for things in nature, small stones, moss, small leaves, maybe flowers and berries, small sticks that create a fence etc. You can of course also bring with you small objects that do not belong in nature.
Remember to think about the scale – the relation between sizes of different objects: What you put in the picture influence the perceived size of the house. This picture, and the video below gives you and idea of how perspective can be manipulated through scale.
For inspiration, even though this is pretty complicated setups: Michael Paul Smith is a photographer who master how to create incredibly accurate outdoor scenes. He is using model cars and forced perspective. In an interview with Fstoppers, he describes his tools, the process and the attention to detail that creating such scenes requires. We are, of course, not going to achieve realism like this
Smith's advice for those trying to do something similar:
The most important rule is to be further away from the background instead of closer. Also, keep the camera lens at the proper height that is appropriate to the scale of the models you are photographing. For 1/24th scale, I have the camera no higher than 2 inches from the model base. This would be the point of view of a 1/24th scale person looking at the scene in front of them.
Another piece of advice that I think is helpful is: you don't need expensive equipment or lighting to create a realistic photo. Too much information in the photo is not a good thing when creating a forced perspective image. You need the subtle blur and the effect of an average lens.
Also, don't try too hard during a shoot. For myself, if I'm shooting for more than an hour then I'm overloading my brain. The best sessions I've had were about 20 minutes long. And don't second guess yourself. If you're thinking too much behind the camera, then you've lost the creative magic that happens between the model and the lens.
The pictures of your map-models, placed inside the wood by the school, indicate some of the effects that we can achieve. Here everything is in focus because of the extremely wide angled lenses of the 360-camera :
Another approach that perhaps can be used if you place your house somewhere where you look down towards the fjord.
The image to the right is manipulated using a service – Tilshiftmaker –that makes a photograph appear as it is taken with a special, macro lens. This makes the images look like a tiny model, an effect that is achieved by creating something that looks like a very narrow depth of field.