Arts District | Forced Perspective Photography

Hi, I'm Michael Gadlin. And I'm Kate Perdoni. Welcome back to Arts District on Rocky Mountain PBS. Ken Hendricks and Larry Patchett have been friends for almost two decades. They share a passion for photography, old cars, and time travel. A few years ago, the Denver duo began experimenting with forced perspective photography. This is when the image is not quite what the eye beholds. They use tiny models, kind of like here what I have in my hand, to simulate large-scale scenes, giving us a glimpse into the past while gaining international appreciation. Lewis Hine said, photographs never lie, but liars can photograph. Photographs never lie, but ours do. We like to think of ourselves as pretty good liars sometimes. With integrity. With integrity, yes. Forced perspective photography is basically shooting models, making them look full-size and fooling the eye. We're taking 24th scale models, bringing them out into the world and trying to make them look as real as possible. One 24th scale model was a half inch equals one foot in the real world. Yeah, basically, if you're a foot away from the model, you need to be 24 feet away from the background. We shoot a wide angle lens, which gives you greater inherent depth of field, and we also shoot a very small aperture, like F25, F29, which gives you even more depth of field. So everything is in focus from a foot in front of the camera to infinity, which really helps sell the illusion. A little over two years ago, we started doing the forced perspective photography. Larry said, well, you've got a camera and I've got some models, let's do this. And so we went out and tried it. And our first photos came out beautifully. We've been having so much fun ever since. We're making very ephemeral dioramas that don't last any longer than it takes us to take a few shots, and then it all goes back into the boxes in there. What really seems to set ours apart is the quality of Colorado light. We've gotten quite a few comments on our photos of how beautiful the blue sky is. And in a way, the secret to this is the props. The first one we did was an ice wagon. And I found little bitty blocks of ice and made a set of ice tongs out of a paperclip. Sack of potatoes, a case of Coca-Cola in the back of a pickup truck, Cobblestone Street. Posters. Fake lamps. Some milk bottles on top of it. It's that additional touch that makes it time travel and helps fool your eye. Every once in a while, I'll take a few models out in the backyard and shoot them just to have a catalog of which models we have available to us. And I thought it would be a good idea to shoot a behind-the-scenes shot of this to just kind of show people how simple it is to get a really good shot of a model car. So I took a cell phone photo of the setup and put it up on Flickr, and it went gangbusters. The first weekend it was up, it got maybe 85,000 views. That's up to 105,000 views right now. It's our most popular photo. Yeah, we spend all the trouble on beautiful sets and beautiful models, expensive cameras, and our most popular shot was done with a cell phone. People from all over the world are seeing our photos, and that's really quite an honor. When I bring my models, I usually dust them off at home, but Larry lets me dust off his models. So I could add a little makeup brush and dust off all the dust because the dust is actually full-scale dust. It doesn't look like 24-scale dust. The more full-scale dust I can get off of the small cars, the less Photoshop work I have to do. You got it. I have spent hours kind of fixing dust on models. We're time traveling, and we want people to kind of travel back to that time with us and remember what it used to be like. We're using models from the 30s, 40s, and 50s and setting up in front of buildings that were around at that time. We try to make everything as authentic as possible. When I was a kid, we had a late 40s Studebaker Champion that we rode around in, and then we upgraded to a 54 Chevy and thought we were living large. I grew up with Packards in the garage, but they were already history by the time I was old enough to know what I was looking at. This car is a time machine. Like, it doesn't say DeLorean. You won't find a flux capacitor anywhere under the hood or the taillight, but it's a way to travel through time, which, in short, is what we do with the Ford Perspective. We're able to go back in time to an era that evokes nostalgia in the people looking at the pictures or just a sense of whimsy. Some of these photos that we take just bring back memories, and the younger people kind of get to see what it was like back in the day. This car has four ashtrays and not a cup holder to be found. So just in subtle little ways like that, the different way people viewed the world in the 1950s than we see the world now, and our time travel efforts help let us highlight little bits and pieces of both worlds. That's hilarious. Yeah. We both love old cars, and we both love photography, and when you can combine a passion with a creative outlet, that's gold. And we're just having the most fun that we've ever had. I can't improve on that. You can check out the entirety of 124th Scale's amazing photography collection at the link on your screen. Wouldn't it be fun to experiment with that kind of forced perspective photography? I kind of want to do that now. We can try it now. I mean, we have two small perspective items here. All we got to do is have natural light and be outside doing it. So this image received thousands of views in one day. It's beautiful and looks so realistic.