Advice for Toy Photography

When I started this blog, I was kind of just there as a reviewer, but I have always been a creative deeply invested in visual media. As such, the eventual drive came to make pretty photos of my dolls and other toy subjects, to explore their aesthetics and stories and give my blog some attractive pictures to highlight posts with and make you wanna read 'em. It's become the primary focus of my blog passion now, with photo ideas being a huge driver toward what I want to discuss. As such, I've spent a lot of time developing my skill in photographing and designing images of dolls from a home setup without a spacious studio or the budget or talent for stop-motion quality sets. I thought I'd discuss what I've gotten from this experience. All of my raw photo work prior to digital edits is done with my Samsung phone camera, and even the phone's editor is usually enough to create my final pictures. I do not have (and honestly, refuse to buy) Photoshop, but I've used the free software Inkscape for digital touch-ups, as well as adding free Photoshop clone GIMP to my toolkit. I'm not covering full digital-composition stuff I've done in this post, since that's a bit of a different skillset. This page is more about how to make photo-heavy images look good.

My body-model custom Maudie (say hi on her post; she's kind of a staple) will demonstrate for a few photos.

Level 1: Basic presentation, no staging (Documentary photos)

If you purely want to show off a subject as a standalone piece to say it's cool and you like it, or to neutrally depict it for review pictures, then it's entirely about focus and lighting. You want your subject to be legible and represent a true-to-life appearance so your audience sees what you see.

This is not your goal if you want to show off your subject.

This photo is taken in low light with deliberately low focus. If I tried to post this on Instagram saying "look at my doll she's so cute", she'd absolutely flop and would not do numbers. (Not that I've felt super fulfilled by Instagram interaction anyway; it's been nice enough, but at large, Tumblr sharing has given me more feedback and fulfillment.)

You can get surprisingly far with the phone camera even in suboptimal shooting conditions, however. Say a home intruder was sitting by the lamp's light switch and was gonna throw me out the window if I didn't shoot with this exact setup...I could still get a better picture by making sure the focus was right and then tweaking the color temperature and brightness in the photo editor.

Still not perfect, of course. I could have tried even more for focus, and you can still tell this is a low-light photo.

Don't listen to the impulse to just use the flash for everything. That is the Devil talking.

Yes, it's bright and clear, but there's something uncanny, just a little, in my eye. The super stark shadow thrown behind Maudie makes the lighting feel as artificial as it is, and the flash doesn't actually brighten the scenery that much. Flash should be used for effect, not for neutral presentation.

Generally, the frustrating truth is that natural daylight really is ideal illumination for photography, but you can't tell it to stay around or reschedule it, so you have to be mindful of the seasons and light timing of your area, as well as extenuating weather that messes it up. Getting a good neutral full-room light should be sufficient for cases where natural daylight isn't available.

I get by with this artificial room-light setup pretty often, and it can be edited fairly well to match daytime photos if I want.

Sometimes I forget to turn off the warm bedside lamp while the main room light is on, though, which subtly and disagreeably messes with the shadows and tint a bit.

My desk is neutral enough to serve as a non-distracting background. If you're on the next level of neutral display, you may have a sheet of paper unrolled from wall to floor to serve as a featureless white backdrop to put your subject on, which can be shot and boosted to make for a white void of isolation, but I don't have that right now and I'm okay without it.

Level 2: Pretty portraits

If you don't want to stage a scene but want a good picture, there are two big things to bring in--lighting design and backgrounds.

The very simplest background for a portrait, for me, is just black. 

While pure white is common in basic presentation, black is a dramatic, appealing option for a more artsy picture, and comes in handy if you work with spooky subjects like I do.

If you want an easy black background, you can buy a black craft board or deconstruct a cardboard box or something and paint the surface black. You just want any reasonably rigid panel you can easily pick up and put down and lean against anything without it crumpling or slumping to the floor. If you paint your board, it does not have to be the blackest black because you can easily darken the shadows and black out the backdrop in post with your phone editor. (The blacker the backdrop with the base shot, though, the less the rest of the image will be boosted in contrast when editing it darker. If the background isn't dark enough, you'll be boosting the shadows and contrast of the whole picture and changing the image significantly by the time the backdrop is a black void in the phone editor.) You can also color over spots with black digitally to tidy up the effect.

I also sometimes use a black velvet costume cape as the backdrop, but it attracts fur in my cat household like crazy and the logistics of hanging it are often obstructive and frustrating.

Here, however, I exploited the fur attraction by using pieces pilled on the cape to create the bubbles of this "underwater" shot as an in-camera effect!

This photo was taken with the doll and cape laid on the floor.

Black cloth is easier to lay under the standing subject's feet than to hang vertically behind them, but this is useful to let the whole figure be photographed against black--otherwise, the surface they're standing on may not be part of the void. Two black boards at a right angle, a board behind and a cloth below, or a board behind and an already-black surface below can create a full black void background. If your subject has a lot of black coloring and you don't want their silhouette to be too absorbed into the background, you can light them just a little bit to catch the edges of their hair and clothes or sculpt or whatnot and make them more separate from the black void behind them.

If you want to have the subject as just a head on black background, many dolls can fit into a black sock that can cover their body and isolate their head, which will black out into pure shadow along with the background in post. Otherwise, wrapping with other black fabric is an option.

And I can't say enough for colored/patterned fabrics and printed craft papers to make a portrait more lively.

Every month, I'm liable to get another batch of printed paper sheets that suddenly become relevant to one of my subjects, though many return in circulation as useful designs. The really big sheets of printed/patterned paper, or matte-texture wrapping papers, are also treasures for staging larger pictures with. Most wrapping papers are glossed, which can be tricky to photograph.

Draped fabric and visible folds can be your background if that's your desired effect.

Next is lighting. I use small light sources (a mini desk lamp, a color-changing remote-control nightlight, a headlamp with multiple brightnesses and a red setting, and a blacklight flashlight) to affect the coloring and light angle of a photo. This can make pictures look lush, dramatic, warm, cold, sinister, or eerie depending on your coloring and how you light something.

Color can also be drawn out of regular light sources by using a colored sheet as a filter over the bulb. If I want two colored lights interplaying, I use the nightlight on one color and can add in the desk lamp with construction paper over the LED for another color.

The best way to color a light source would be colored cellophane sheets that wouldn't dim the light, so I'll need to look into that.

Black-and-white photography is incredible when you've done something cool with your lighting, so always test a black-and-white edit or shoot of a setup if you've done lighting stuff!

As a human, your available hands should be limited to two maximum, so wrangling your lights can be difficult alongside your camera. Having lights rigged on poseable arms or stands or a tripod for your camera can help make sure everything is working as you want. I'm still working on that.

You can also use candles for lighting, though they typically don't illuminate as starkly or dramatically as you might hope, and they have an obvious fire risk. Still, in some circumstances, even paired with colored light...

(The cauldron is the candle here.)

Blacklight is always fun when you have a subject that pops under it, but the phone camera hates it and good damn luck making your pictures look like what you're actually seeing. If you find success, though, it's great.

The last thing is phone filters. Download the free ones available to create a palette you can scroll through in the edit. Any picture could perhaps be transformed and elevated by a specific filter effect.

Level 3-- Scene staging

So you want to show an actual scene with story or sense of place. Well, this can be done! My first tip is generally to favor indoor environments to set photo concepts in, just because those are easier to stage, outdoors has a lot of scenery that obviously belies the scale of the toy, and you might unjustly look like a creep carrying your dolls around and taking photos where people can see you. I also like working with the indoors because you can exploit a living space to create your "set" and reduce your work. Look for details and textures in the building you live in, and architectural features that could be reinterpreted for doll-scale scenery. For example, this bathroom set for Sadie to summon Bloody Mary in consisted of furniture crafted myself and poster-board walls, but the floor is the actual floor of my bathroom.

If you have room corners in your house you can use for room corners in tiny scale, use them.

Walls can be changed with printed paper temporarily hung up for photos' sake, or else you can make foam-board walls to set the parameters of your photoshoot room and paint or paper them how you like. Remember, you're only shooting for the camera frame. It doesn't have to be real. 

Here's a room corner utilized with paper hung on the walls and a towel for mossy carpet to create a scene.

This was my Sweeney Todd-style horror barbershop setup on the inside, with a red windmill blade outside the window.

And this was the outside of the cardboard wall.

Only one blade of the mill was made, and the window was frosted cling wrap with stretched yarn forming the panes.

Here's a hall built with three foam-board walls and a poster-card ceiling. 

The walls were painted and had cutouts to fit doors into, as well as duct tape lining the bottom to simulate a baseboard. The floor is printed paper, and the walls are nailed and screwed together. Very simple.

I shot this outside so I could use real garden scenery as the view through the door on the rightmost wall.

Furniture can be sourced through dollhouse avenues. Most fashion dolls and Living Dead Dolls fall in the 1/6 scale, and big doll brands typically have bespoke furniture you can source for very easy set dressing matched to them. Small dolls are typically 1/12 scale, and some dolls are irregular scales and hard to set for. Use these two common scales as search terms when looking for options if you've gotten something that seems compatible. There are other established dollhouse scales which are smaller. These scales have range and the proportions and style of the doll can affect how some furniture works. LDD and Monster High are very different shapes and MH furniture doesn't easily cross over to LDD.

Some furniture can easily be crafted or faked at home by assembling parts together. Tables are really simple so long as you have a reasonably sturdy panel and something to stand it on. Oven-bake clay slabs and wooden dowel legs also work well for tables. 

This table is sculpted baked clay glued onto dowel legs and painted.

Wooden craft plaques and wood pieces for legs also work.

At my jankiest, I even put a ribbon spool on some Tinker Toys and glued some fabric to shape on top of it for a circular table I needed! With any set dressing, the more details you can include, the better the image will scan. Think about what's around you in real environments and use fabrics and doll accessories and whatever human-scale objects you can repurpose and reframe to make a scene more elaborate and believable. In the bathroom photo above, I used doll accessory pieces to show bathroom amenities selling the location better. In the barbershop, I used a Create-a-Monster doll as a macabre coat rack, included a door to the shop, and a sink and a broken mirror. The living room before that was dressed with multiple dollhouse pieces. Arrange and add and test photos and compositions to see what looks best.

A pad of fake grass is a very useful resource for certain photos. I used it in the red hallway shoot above to transition into the real garden scenery viewed through the door, and I've used the fake grass elsewhere when it was convenient (or when the grass outside was dead in the cold seasons). 

Living Dead Dolls Dottie Rose shot on a fake sidewalk--custom-sculpted--and fake grass. (The doll's story was that she died from sunlight exposure while chasing her escaped dog, so I thought she was a suburban lady who'd have fallen dead right in front of a sidewalk panel she had signed when it was wet, reaching into her own handprint as her last gesture. )

 
If you do shoot outside, look for walls and natural features that are good for staging a setting with. It's harder to create outdoor "sets", but you can find small scenes in nature and buildings, and with creativity, you can do great things. If you have the opportunity to go "on location" during travel, embrace it!

Weather and celestial events can be used, too--for instance, I photographed the moon (as best as I was able with my subpar equipment) during the March 2025 lunar eclipse and then added that moon photography into pictures with LDD Tina Pink, who died during a lunar eclipse.

The actual eclipsing moon via my phone camera, tinted pink for my purposes.

The moon at total eclipse.

A composition with Tina Pink on the lawn outside and the eclipsing moon added in; black gradient transitioned the lawn photo into a black sky where the moon was edited in.

Photographing toys has made me re-engage a little and pay more attention to the world around me, as well as making me more festive during holiday seasons, reinvigorating my celebrations as I play them up for themed reviews! I appreciate the experiences this hobby has given me.

Plants can be digitally color-edited for the effect of a season you're not photographing in, or for stylistic effect.

Green plants turned yellow-brown because it was springtime when I got Isaac and I needed autumnal tones.

Green plant scenery turned yellow for Daisy Slae's stylized yellow and brown 1970s tones.

Yellowed plants edited more blue-green to make Eggzorcist look more "springtime" while shooting her review in autumn.

Green leaves turned red for stylistic effect to match Maggot's color palette.

Greenery edited blue for a mystical fantasy Wonderland tone.

You can also fully cheat the scenery and put your toy in front of a photo on a screen, but the size of the screen vastly limits the proportions of doll to background.

(If I could go to space just to photograph a Martian troll doll, there really wouldn't be any stopping me.)

This is also the safest way to photograph a doll in front of fire.

And remember not every photo gains its appeal from clearly showing its subject! Painted glass can create a fun frosted effect, or else fogged glass in cold can be used for interesting effects.

Frozen Charlotte inside a glass cylinder painted white for a frost effect.

Yuki-Onna behind a foggy window passes for standing in a blizzard!

Using darkness and fuzzy quality also adds an aesthetic appeal for mysterious, nostalgic, or creepy photos.

I'm not the person to give technical advice on composition and framing (how to arrange the subject in the frame of the camera and make the tableau work inside the rectangle). Do look up the rule of thirds for basic official guidance, but I've really kind of eyeballed things myself this whole time based on instinctual "that looks good" or "that's not right".

Level 4: Digital Editing

I've already shown snippets of digital-editing work up to this point, since it's become such a useful tool to me as I've gone on! I'm not going to teach you how to use editing programs here, but they're very helpful once you gain a command of the software. The free Photoshop alternative I use is GIMP. 

Edits can be used to fix minor parts of the photo that just didn't shoot right. In the picture with Sin in front of the flames with her head lit from inside, I edited a bit to fix some distracting stray hairs on her wig, and to make the glow inside her eyes even and remove the visible elements of the mini lamp I dropped into her head for the effect.

The final photo from my phone.

The final final photo tidied by editing.

Editing can be used to create scenery and edit things when you just don't have the locale to shoot your desired image in-camera. The key to good compositing (putting objects into scenery they weren't photographed in) is to match the lighting of the picture you took with the picture you're putting your subject into. This sunset balcony photo of LDD variant Isabel had no two elements sharing a source. Isabel, the body behind her, the knife on the ground, the tree branches, and the base scenery were all separate. They worked when combined thanks to my lighting efforts with the live subjects (Isabel, the knife, and the doll playing the body). I shot them lit from the front to match the light source in the backdrop, and with the correct color tone, so the elememts would easily drop into the scene, and then used a free background-remover tool to clip the subjects out so they could be placed into the new picture.

With half-decent skill, photo editing can push an inadequate raw photo into the desired target. You don't have to give up on your idea if you can't stage it absolutely perfectly, so long as you get it enough there. I found that to be the case when staging the "Red Light, Green Light" game with Monster High's adaptation of Squid Game Young-hee.

Raw photo with incomplete scenery and visible paper edges for the flooring.

Edit with finished blended scenery and adjusted proportions.

I use Inkscape for more graphical compositions and poster edits, but those tend to be a more tangential discipline from the raw photography when the photo ends up being the least of the work on display.

Level 5: Derangement

Don't have an underwater to shoot with? Make an underwater out of a tub in your basement, tie that doll sucker down with fishing line, and use colored dye powder to cloud the tank and hide the edges!

Make a whole tea table setting for your dolls! Five unique times!

Wait for snow and stage an icy pond by digging a hole and covering it with glass!

Build your dolls snowmen!

Paint whole fanart pieces and use them as physical props in your photoshoot!

The wall Valentine in the middle with the two characters on it is hand-painted.

Reflect your ghost characters off glass and align the reflection to the scene with the glass panel in front of your setting (Pepper's Ghost effect; look it up!)

None of those ghosts were digitally placed! All raw photos!

Turn your photos into dollhouse props and then turn the dollhouse into photo scenery!

Sculpt props themed on a character and photograph just those rather than the toy they're crafted for!

Sweet Tooth, a ghoul with candy corn replacing her teeth.

Prop candy corn teeth I sculpted for a photo on a simulated morgue tray. (Teeth props not to scale with the doll).

Remove vampires from reflections (this trick is done by editing together two versions of the same shot--one where the vampire was present and one with the vampire absent).

Write in-universe fictional documents staged as photographic visual recreations, like old newspapers!

I've made this one into a dollhouse photo prop, too!

Conclusion

There's a lot you can do with toy photos for a relatively low budget. I love staging photography as an evolution of imaginative play, keeping the creative storytelling spirit the toys were designed for in a way that suits me today. Even just staging pictures with them on pretty backdrops is a rewarding exercise in design analysis and coordination, and it's not as daunting as it may seem to get really snazzy pictures.