I did a shoot with a good friend of mine, Noah Ginex. He will be in the upcoming Chicago Improv Festival leading his self titled Noah Ginex Puppet Company into battle vs. Felt, another improv puppet company, in an improv grudge match called The Cagematch. I won't go into any more details about the show since, well, this is a photography blog. But if your interested visit the links.

Left to right: Amanda Rountree, Fuzzy Gerdes, and Noah Ginex

The photo was shot against a white background with the subjects filling the frame. In photoshop, I replaced the white background with the gradient blue and widened the whole thing to accommodate text to advertise the show.

The hardest thing about shooting puppets is getting the eyes to look where you want them to look. Even with just one puppet, the puppeteer has no idea if the puppet is actually looking into the camera. So it's a combination of directing the puppeteer's hand movements and as the photographer, moving around to find the right angles.

With 3 puppets and 3 puppeteers, its an uphill battle getting all the eyes focused on the same thing. When I was a kid I went to Space Camp, and truth be told I never thought I'd need to remember terms like roll, yaw, and pitch. But boy did it help with directing hand movements. But even then, you have to be clear who your talking too. At one point I was directing Amanda to get closer to Fuzzy. She kept moving the Pig closer and closer, but hadn't realized I was directing her. That got a nice laugh out of everyone and after that I was sure to be very clear about who I was talking too.

Overall I'm very pleased with how this turned out. If you have any questions about the image, feel free to leave me a comment and I'll be happy to answer.

Thanks for stopping by,
Greg Inda