Cool and Collected - collecting pop culture memories and memorabilia
A general discussion of collecting cool things, such as vintage and modern toys, comic books, ephemera.
I am blessed with two wonderful sons who are just getting into superheroes and action figures. After watching the Avengers cartoon and seeing all the hype for the upcoming movie, my youngest started carrying around an Iron Man action figure (which just warmed dear old dad’s heart). The other day he told me that Iron [...]
The last two posts showed how I made the forest diorama, and now it’s time to see it in action… G.I. Joe action figures fit right into the landscape. By adding a few sticks to the scene, the photo has more depth. A red light bulb was used to simulate the brake lights of the [...]
In the first part of this series, I showed you how to make the diorama base out of styrofoam insulation board, glue and paint. The fun continues here with the addition of the trees… Insulation foam is a great material for dioramas because it is so easy to work with. After doing a little yard [...]
Here I go again… I had some insulation foam laying around, and Ithought I could put it to good use. The base is 2″ thick foam board cut to a 2′ square. Liquid Nails was used to glue down pieces of pink 1″ foam board, to make the contours of a hill. Once the glue [...]
Friend of the site, Ashley Raburn of Life with Fandom, and his pal, Luke, have a new video series in the works called “Collecting Nostalgia,” where they highlight collectors like you and me. Check out the first video… I’m really excited about this endeavor and think that Ashley and Luke have done a great job. The [...]
Firefly–everyone’s favorite saboteur… For this photo, I used a clear plastic ceiling tiles for the backdrop, and had some blue Christmas lights behind it, which cast a purplish tone on the figure. I held an LED flashlight directly above the figure to make it look like he’s standing beneath a spotlight. Here I go using [...]
I’m about ready to just call this G.I. Joe week on Cool & Collected, and it’s only Tuesday. I have just been having too much fun… Just by moving the light sources around slightly, I got some dramatically different results. I thought it might be fun to throw a vehicle into the scene, and this [...]
Last week, I won a bunch of auctions at the online Big Toy Auction and a huge box arrived on my doorstep today — that was fast! There were some serious bidders participating in the auction, and I didn’t get most of the items that I went for, like the Dino-Hunters set, but I did [...]
I’m having way too much fun photographing these action figures… I wanted to take some photos with more than one figure to get some more depth into the scene. A black plastic plant tray works great as a security fence. I lit this guy with a small LED flashlight, which gives a stark contrast to [...]
Some of the new G.I. Joe action figures are just too tempting on the store shelves, and I’ve been picking them up here and there only because I wanted to photograph them. I’ve also been wanting to play around with different lighting techniques with some of my toy photos, so here are a few images [...]
