For the 32nd Scavenger Hunt, I had decided (even before the Hunt words were public!) to try to make a series with wooden manikins. That made things Interesting when I saw that one of the words was “broccoli” – how was I supposed to make that work? Thankfully, I got the idea of Broccoli-Man pretty quickly and, once I had the idea, the implementation was…. almost straightforward.

I first shot my manikin in a “super-hero pose” and a broccoli at a reasonable height (that took a few attempts).

Camera	Pentax K-1 II
Lens	Sigma 28mm f/1.8 EX Aspherical DG DF Macro
Focal length	28mm
F-Number	F/8
Exposure time	1/25s
ISO	320

And then, Photoshop to the rescue – blend in the images, play with the color toning, done, right? Eeeh. The processing was less straightforward than I would have liked, for a few reasons.

• The removal of the metallic stand ended up being more annoying than expected.
• I should really invest in a small green screen to make its removal easier, that would make my life significantly easier.
• Relatedly to that point, I “fixed” the issue of the background by blurring the wall behind… and not realizing that my selection was far from perfect, which meant going back for more, more awkward edits.
• My Lightroom-to-Photoshop-to-Lightroom process is dubious at best and my handling of Photoshop files is laughable (it seems my layers and whatnot are actually stored in a TIF file, which is highly suspicious and probably WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS…) – I’ll need to see how to properly do that for the next Hunt.
• The merge of the broccoli and the manikin texture at the neck level took me a long time, and is still not up to what I would have liked to get (which may be… difficult! 🙂 ).

Now that I’m writing this behind-the-scenes post, I also realize that there’s a bit of a “halo” (coming from the blur effect) around the manikin, but not around the broccoli head, which is a bit sad. I’m also a bit annoyed that I didn’t think of giving him a cape too – but oh well – next time, maybe!

I’m still happy with a number of things in this picture:

• The concept amuses me greatly.
• I really like the posing of the manikin.
• I made my life easy for the composite taking pictures at the right level and with the same light and whatnot.
• I’m very happy with the color toning (and I discovered how to do the wood coloring in PS, which makes me happy!).

The complete Scavenger album is available here: the Broccoli album.