Goodnight Nessie

Earlier this year a friend from work visited Scotland with her family, and brought back a handful of miniature Loch Ness Monsters made of glass that she purchased from a local vendor after spending time near the well-known lake just south of Inverness. About an inch and a half long, each of the miniatures contained a striking amount of detail, from subtle swirls of color to a tiny indentation for the eye. As I held the one she gave me in my hand, I immediately had an idea of how to capture an image of it with my camera. Way back in 2015 I took this picture of a little wooden toy train that that my son got for a birthday present. I used my Nikon D200, a 50mm lens, a tripod, and some crumpled-up aluminum foil. That’s it. It wasn’t fancy but the results were pretty cool, and over the years I have revisited that general compositional idea here and there to take similar pictures of other small objects.

I wanted to do the same thing with this tiny little Loch Ness Monster, so later that day I used a scene not too dissimilar from the one that I used to create the original image of the loon. First, I crumpled some aluminum foil and set it on the table and carefully set the little Nessie among some wrinkles. I then put my D750 on a tripod with 105mm f/2.8 macro lens replacing the old Nifty Fifty, pointed it at the figure, and focused. Finally I got out several of my Pavotubes and placed them around the set, including one that I held in my hand to get just the right reflection on Nessie’s head while the exposure was being created. If you look below you can just barely see the glass figure in front of my lens, and everything else is more or less exactly as it was when I took this week’s photo.

I took a few photos and was mostly pleased with the result, but something didn’t look quite right. It was a fine picture of the glass monster, but it didn’t have the right feeling, or emotion, that I was hoping to capture. Something was missing. Then it hit me: the loch ness monster lives in a lake, right? The essential element I had neglected to add was just that: water!

I poured a bit of water onto the foil, and that gave the scene exactly what it needed. My son, upon seeing the final shot, said “Dad, it looks like it’s actually swimming through the water.” I was really hoping to capture that feeling, and when I heard his reaction it felt pretty good–as if I had done what I set out to do. This was an extraordinarily fun picture to take, and who knows…one day maybe I’ll be able to visit Loch Ness with my family for real and maybe even take a picture of the actual monster swimming at sunset.

Or maybe not ;)