Project: Obitsu March 2015

Like Let's Joe!, this month's Project: Obitsu entry has been delayed by the same life drama crap. That's just as well though because it gave me time to reassess what I had planned and come up with something different. First of all, this is my first attempt at posting images from my iPhone camera to this blog. Second, this reintroduces a character not seen in my corner of the "blogosphere" in quite a while with her first new photo shoot in over two years.

Claire is an Obitsu 27 cm SB 2 body with a pre-painted W 02 "Pinkie" head. Once upon a time, she had an active online presence with her own blog and appearances at various message boards. Life changes, time moves on and the ability to maintain an "in character" online life for a doll diminished considerably. Anyway, here she is after an extended absence.

Most of Claire's outfit came from a couple of early Dragon female action figures. The first generation Dragon female body bore more than a passing resemblance to the Volks Dollfie (1/6 scale) of the time. Consequently, their clothes tend to fit Dollfie/Super Action Jenny sized bodies pretty well.  Her t-shirt is from Winona, an NYPD sniper, while the pants and boots come from the often hard to find "Hit Team" figure of HK actress Jo Kuk. The jacket is an early Azone piece that I had wanted for years and finally found on eBay a couple years ago. While not part of the fabled Azone Combat Gear line, it uses the camo pattern from one ACG outfit and so integrates well with those items. I would love to find the pants and field coat in this same pattern but that's about as likely as finding adamantium plated unobtainium Jabberwocky teeth!

Finally, here's a shot I took and posted to Instagram a few days ago:

Let's Joe! March 2015

Holy cow, I was starting to believe this month's entry wasn't going to happen! So much drama for one fairly unremarkable photo shoot....

Anyway, our Joe for March has been outfitted as a police officer. His body armor says SWAT so I'll say he's on the SWAT team too! Although he was a simple figure to put together, I'm generally happy with the way he turned out. I didn't come up with any kind of back story or even a name for him so I'll leave it to you the readers to fill in those blanks.

His outfit is mostly some old BBI stuff with a few (also old) 21st Century Toys items thrown in.

Finally, I included a shot of Joe hanging out and chatting with Officer Ryotsu Kankichi. Ryo-san is a Bandai figure from the late '90s and still one of my favorites. You'll notice that there's more than a passing similarity in the way these two are designed. The story is that when Hasbro was working on what would become the Super Articulated body, the designers were provided with one of these Ryo-san figures by a local collector and it may have influenced some of the engineering choices they made. Who knows whether that's the case but I know the Hasbro folks at least had a chance to examine a copy of Ryo-san when this version of GI Joe was being designed, so it's an interesting bit of trivia.

I hope to keep on chugging along with this project but like I said in my last post, it has been stupidly difficult recently to simply take photos or put together figures. I have been playing with Instagram the past few days (I'm Geektopian there too) and it's fun for quick, on the go shots. However, I don't see it quite filling the same role as this blog nor replacing it in the near future. I am determined to keep things going here at RoG but please bear with me if things get quiet around here from time to time. Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to crank out photos and posts about little plastic people!

Travelin' Doll, Instagram, et. al.

Sorry things have been quiet around here lately. Crap-tons of family drama combined with having two toddlers attached to me around the clock have conspired to eat up all the spare time I don't have. I don't plan to make any changes to the format of this blog in the near future but it occurs to me that I need to do something different to accommodate my life as it is. Two major problems are that Blogger isn't very usable in iOS and the photo host is somewhat limiting for loading cell phone pictures. Blogging on my home computer and lugging around my DSLR for photos has gotten much more difficult with my two "assistants" constantly underfoot and aforementioned lack of spare time.

So.... What to do? One thought that occurred to me was to do a sort of travelogue featuring one or two of my GI Joes and post it on Instagram or maybe Flickr. I nearly always have my phone with me or close by and I use it to do a lot of my actual blogging and other internet stuff as well. Of course, this photo blog doesn't have to be just Joes; it could feature Neemos, Obitsus or even some other dolls/action figures that I haven't shown around here. However, my thinking is that there would be one or two primary characters and not a "cast of thousands". Since I always have kids in tow or crawling on me, whatever subject I chose would need to be portable, durable and not too precious in terms of cost or rarity. So yeah, no super-rare 70cm resin ball joint dolls for this project!

So, how does this all work? I know a number of my readers have traveling doll blogs and use Instagram and/or Flickr with cellphone cameras. What was your experience with these services and were there any limitations, frustrations or pitfalls that I should know about? Can I cross post images from Instagram to other platforms like Blogger or (for the old-school among us) message boards? Any tips for photographing dolls with a cellphone camera? I find I still prefer my DSLR for image stability and quality but maybe I'm not giving the phone a fair chance. Finally, is this the sort of thing any of you would find interesting? Or would it be just more links to click and more sites to join just to look at some boring, silly pictures of dolls and action figures? Let me know what you think!