One thing about me has always been consistent. An inconsistency with hobbies. I’ve taken up and dropped off of more hobbies than I can count.
Without a job in NC I did a lot of woodworking projects. Made a nice wooden box I still use to this day, spent hours and hours sanding it. Also bought a real nice tabletop, cut a kind of cross pattern along it on the tablesaw to create one inch squares. Then drilled about a hundred holes, one in each square. To create a D&D tabletop that I could create 3D maps with. I took some pieces of wood and carved out little brick and wood walls, painted them and stuck little pegs in them. So you could attach them to the peg holes in the board. Spent a good while on that, along with carving little tables and chairs. Before I had to get a job and dropped off of that hobby.
I’ve collected more Funko Pops than anyone should. I believe my last count was over 250. After I returned from NC and was living rent free at my girlfriends parents house, I was making $15 an hour and only really had my new car payment to worry about. I sunk a lot of money into the hunt for all the Funko Pops I found interesting. I also have boxes full of Star Wars action figures, 5 or 6 long boxes full of comics. Collecting was a big hobby for many years.
Oh and LEGO. If you’ve been following along you may remember the Minecraft Lego sets I took pictures of. That’s just a fraction. Lego is quite literally the oldest hobby I have. Some of it passed down from my older brother, I have Lego pieces that could be twice my age. Becoming an adult with my own money did not help that hobby slow down.
But one of my old coworkers turned me on to another type of collecting hobby. Hot Wheels. They have chase variants that are rare as fuck. There’s all kind of color combinations. Real Rider wheels (basically just rubber instead of plastic)
I dove headfirst into that collecting as well. No idea what a count of that would stand at. At least I know I spent considerably less on that then any other collecting hobby. Most Hot Wheels are just a dollar each. Until you start getting the series ones with the rubber tires and full metal cast bodies.
But to the point, after collecting Hot Wheels for a while I took a crack at making some custom ones for myself. I set up a whole work station and bought tools in order to take them apart, swap the wheels. Had a whole painting setup, and put the whole thing back together. Which I started work on probably a dozen different cars, and only ever completed 3. Which I then took pictures of.
1/15 Sec - F5 - 45mm - ISO 100
1/15 Sec - F5 - 45mm - ISO 100
1/15 Sec - F5 - 45mm - ISO 100
Before and after shots would have been good to get. But I know I stripped the paint off of this metal body, painted it all black and played around with a gold splatter effect.
For the actual shot, all I knew was from the product photography setup my brother had at work. I knew multiple lights from my training in technical theatre. And I think I mentioned on this blog before that I had picked up two little Neweer dimmable LED lights. I think I used a plain sheet of construction paper as the white backdrop.
Now this next one was actually the first one I did. But not the first one I completed. It took a lot more time as I replaced the wheels with some real riders. I blacked out the windows and painted the whole thing in a kind of metallic blue. Then I went back in to do the details. Which took a lot of tiny pieces of masking tape an x-acto knife. Now the details may not be great, and the lines didn’t come out as clean as I wanted them. But I learned a lot and I’m still proud of how it came out.
1/30 Sec - F10 - 55mm - ISO 160
1/30 Sec - F18 - 37mm - ISO 500
0.6 Sec - F29 - 37mm - ISO 100
I only have one shot of this last one. I think it started out as a plain white body. Which I stripped down to paint purple and then did the underside in green. Even did green on the wheels.
1/30 Sec - F4.5 - 37mm - ISO 100
Now those were just the ones I custom painted or modified in some way. I did do a lot more of Hot Wheels straight off the card. Because as you can imagine this was a lot easier to shoot, didn’t have to put hours of work into them.
Apparently I took this one with my phone. I think because I didn’t own a macro lens, and none of the ones I had would let me get as close as I wanted and still be able to focus.
1/20 Sec - F4.5 - 37mm - ISO 100
This was also when this website underwent one of the several massive overhauls I did since I started it. I had decided I wasn’t going to try and make YouTube videos of let’s plays and I wanted to try something different. I had a lot of different ideas for what I wanted to do, but all of them centered around trying to make money off the internet. And this was no exception, I liked being creative with the custom Hot Wheels paint jobs and I could see it picking up steam and me making an etsy page or something. But in the back of my head it really was just about the photography. And that was a way to accomplish myself as a product photographer was to shoot my own creations.
It would still be a few years before I found that when you just create for the sake of it, and stop trying to turn a hobby into a money making venture, that it all falls into place and you enjoy it a lot more. Even if I never got to the point where I was actually making any money from my plans. Once I stopped coming up with ideas to try and make a living off of it in the future, I started doing them just because I enjoyed it. And you know what, even if I still have to keep a 40 hour job to fuel the hobby I have had several gigs now, some paying actual cash some just for the mutual benefit of creators.
