Tech specs
Board games have existed since before 3500 BC, according to artifacts found in ancient tombs. Here are some pieces of current games.
When winter comes, there are a lot of days when I don’t feel like bundling up in multiple insulated layers, opening some hand warmers, and grabbing a backpack full of camera gear to do some outdoor photography.
I do still go out. Winter landscape and wildlife photos are nice to have. But I also use winter months to work on some indoor photography project ideas I jot down during the year.
This is one of those projects.
We have a number of board games we’ve bought over the decades that are stashed on shelves in the basement. Each game has its own unique elements: board design, tokens or pieces, cards and other objects. Many of these are so ingrained in our culture that they immediately bring to mind the game. The race car or dog or thimble in Monopoly. A knight in chess. A checker. The candlestick in Clue (Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick). The planchette (the sliding pointy thing) on a Ouija board.
The small size of the pieces gave me an opportunity to do some macro or close-up photography and to try some different lighting techniques.
I had spent time doing studio setups showing elements of individual games and was ready to return all the pieces to their boxes when I noticed just how many different items I had out. So I decided to do a montage showing a bit of everything from a variety of board games.
I opened the Monopoly board and used it as the base. You can spot Milburn Pennybags (the Mr. Monopoly guy) peeking through items at the top of the photo and the “go to jail” square from the board at the lower right. Then I began tossing pieces in a somewhat random distribution. There are chess pieces, checkers, an Ouija planchette, and tokens, cards and money from Monopoly, Life, Clue, Sorry!, and maybe a few other games.
I positioned the camera pointing directly down at the collection and positioned lighting to lift detail of the tokens and game pieces without casting too many shadows.
I learned after completing this project that board games have existed since before 3500 BC, according to artifacts found in ancient tombs. Now I’m going to convert this image of board games into a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for my wife. By the way, jigsaw puzzles were originally created in London during the 1760s by mapmaker John Spilsbury, who glued paper maps onto wood and cut them along country borders.