Cue the battle music!

5/31/2020

This Haunter shot may be the fastest I have ever purchased a figure and completed a shot with haha. Gengar has always been my favorite Pokemon, and I love Gastly and Haunter as well. When I saw that Wicked Cool Toys was putting out a Haunter figure earlier this year, I knew I had to get him. I was at Target this morning looking for something else when I saw that they had some of the new Pokemon figures. They had Haunter, Snorlax, and Aerodactyl from the new wave, and I just picked up Haunter and Snorlax for now.

I really like the clear base that Haunter comes with to hold up his body and two hands. My original plan for this shot was to do a white-hot shot with the lights bright enough to just make the clear stands invisible. I was struggling to get the lighting right without washing Haunter out, so I decided it would be best to add a cutout to hid the stands instead. I thought it would be cool to go for a wild Pokemon encounter from the original game, so that's what I did. I made the cutout in Photoshop, and then I printed it off, cut it out, and then glued it to a piece of cardboard so light wouldn't shine through the paper. I also used a sharpie on the edges of the cutout to completely blackout the edges.

I used several different types of lights for this setup. White-hot shots require tons of bright light to get everything to look right. I used an LED strip light at the base of the backdrop and my two TaoTronics desk lamps pointing at the top of the back drop. To fill in the rest of the backdrop, I used two LumeCubes at 60% brightness pointing at the middle of the backdrop. Finally, I used my two LumeCube Panel Minis on 25% brightness to light Haunter and the cutout.

I definitely made sure to get a black and white variant of this shot to really try to capture the old Game Boy feel. I like the way this shot turned out, and I'm really enjoying these Wicked Cool Toys Pokemon figures. You don't really get much in terms of articulation with the majority of these figures, but they look nice and the price point is decent.

Camera settings for this shot:

ISO - 100

fStop - 25

Shutter Speed - 1/2

Picture Control - Vivid

White Balance - Day White Fluorescent