Time for more pillowcase talk. This one features Sena Kashiwazaki, the rich, insecure, somewhat bisexual eroge enthusiast from Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. I like the manga and I’ve been a fan of Buriki’s art for a while – entirely because of this picture – and I was pleased that the anime adaptation was a lot of fun to watch. Despite not straying past the bounds of convention, the characters are likeably quirky, and it was refreshing to see a show with a male lead that wasn’t completely clueless, milquetoast, or pathetic. It’s one of the few harem-style shows where I didn’t dislike any of the characters, and I’m not sure which one is my favorite. I guess I’d call it a tie among Sena, Kobato, and Rika, but all the characters are cool. Grading strictly on appearance, I’d probably roll with Sena, though, which is why I have this dakimakura cover.

This dakimakura cover is made by Dai Taiwan Teikoku, presumably a Chinese circle, and not the only Chinese group that makes pillowcases – the guy who runs Evening Call is from Shanghai, I think. Rather than distribute their products through consignment shops like Toranoana or White Canvas, they instead sell their doujin goods through BON Cool.

I typically use these dakimakura cover reviews as filler posts for whenever I don’t feel like doing a figure review, but this one serves as a public announcement of sorts. It can be difficult for overseas collectors to purchase dakimakura covers; for a while, Mandarake was, as far as I know basically the sole option for buying doujin pillowcases directly. None of the big doujin stores ship internationally – well, White Canvas says they do, though when I e-mailed them a couple years ago they ignored me, but maybe they’ve changed their policies recently. I probably should ask them again. But anyway – the interesting thing about BON Cool is they are happy to sell to overseas customers, and they even have English and French versions of their website. They’ve opened up a second round of preorders for Sena as well as Yozora, with the order cutoff in a couple of weeks. So anybody who wants to buy a Sena or Yozora pillowcase without needing to go through a proxy can do so with a minimum of fuss.

This pillowcase is, like many doujin dakimakura covers, 160 centimeters long and 50 centimeters wide and made of stretchy spandex fabric. It’s a bit thin – you can probably see some bleed-through of the reverse side in these photos – but feels smooth and sturdy.

There’s a ton of Sena dakimakura covers out there – maybe the most of any recent character – but I went with this one because the art style looks pretty close to the actual character designs. The front side shows Sena looking a bit shy while wearing her school uniform.

The reverse side is the best side and shows her wearing a swimsuit. The art looks great; I really like the way her back is rendered. The ponytail held together with her butterfly clasp is also a very cute touch.

It’s also nice how her fingers form indentations in her skin.

I also like the way her feet are drawn; it’s uncommon to see feet rendered this well, particularly from an unusual viewing angle like this one.

Her face is also very pretty. And relatively accurately; she’s got the characteristic lips and upturned nose from her anime design.

Anyway, of all the Sena pillowcases out there, this one is my favorite. If you’re looking around for a pillowcase of Meat, this one is pretty good, and you can order it yourself without needing a middleman. Heck, if they re-open orders for Kobato, I might order that one; I do own one Kobato pillowcase already, but I wouldn’t mind buying another.

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Numerous figures of the Queen’s Gate characters have been released, offering different takes on the characters depending on the artist that illustrated the respective game book. The Queen’s Gate version of Senhime, however is rather unusual in that she has no game book; her appearance is based off of a single illustration by the artist Yoshikazu Miwa. Perhaps better known by his doujin circle name Synthetic Garden, I’ve been a fan of his art for a long time, particularly because his work encompasses themes like tentacle hentai, girls in bondage, and girls with big breasts. He seems an unlikely choice to provide a Queen’s Gate illustration, particularly one of a character like Sen Tokugawa, and the resulting figure is one that comprises an unusual synthesis that is much more about his style and much less about the anime character.

Several different manufacturers have made Queen’s Gate products, but this one comes from MegaHouse, the most prolific maker of Queen’s Blade and Queen’s Gate figures. Sculpted in 1/8 scale, she’s about 14 centimeters tall. Proportionally, I would say she’s about in line with most of Alter’s 1/8 scale figures, perhaps even a bit larger. She comes with a purple-painted plastic base – which obviously isn’t necessary to keep her upright – and an unusual segmented weapon rather than her more familiar Japanese-style spear.

I hesitated when I ordered this figure, and not solely because she was a Hobby Japan exclusive and thus necessitated going through a proxy to purchase. Rather, my trepidation spawned from the first impression she delivered, in which her head appeared to be melting. Her suspiciously leprotic appearance was discouraging, to say the least – and yet, I still felt compelled to buy her, even without knowing whether the initial sample was just a hastily-assembled prototype. This compulsion – chiefly guided by my enthusiasm for Miwa’s artwork – was at odds with my usual buying practice. With almost every other purchase I make, I perform a huge amount of research, sometimes weeks of it. I seldom buy a book or movie or video game without first consulting multiple reviews. I don’t buy computer or camera equipment without checking the tech forums I follow for user experiences. But when it comes to figures, I have no problem at all plonking out the skrills despite having no idea whether I’ll actually like the figure. I have to imagine that anyone uninvested in this hobby would be utterly appalled at the ease with which I – and numerous other collectors – shell out $100 or $150 a pop with no certainty that it’s going to be any good.

Happily, Senhime’s face is much improved, at least in a technical sense. The sculptor has done a fine job of translating Miwa’s style, and she has the somewhat blank, vaguely sad expression common to much of his work. This look is also visible in Solid Theater’s String Swimsuit Girl figure, which came out back in 2008 and I think was the first figure based off of his art.

While the faces he draws are easily identifiable, he’s also known for drawing pictures of girls with humongous breasts, and this version of Senhime does not disappoint in that respect, as suffice to say, she has a big-ass rack. Her breasts look larger than they actually are, since her top is removable and her breasts appear very large but not significantly larger than the chests of many other anime characters. But for anyone wanting to display her clothed, her chest is gargantuan and I could see that being a turn-off amongst some collectors.

The original version of Senhime wore an outfit comprising a blend of a traditional kimono and a Japanese schoolgirl uniform, but this version wears a crop top with some kind of corset. Taken together, her outfit resembles a short-sleeved leotard or bodysuit. She also has a beltskirt to provide some backside modesty and another rope belt which is strictly ornamental, being that she has no pants that need holding up.

Like many of MegaHouse’s Queen’s Blade and Queen’s Gate figures, Sen’s clothing can be removed by disassembling the figure. Taking her apart and putting her back together isn’t too difficult, though getting her upper and lower torso reattached does take a good bit of force to pop the pieces together. Pegs are provided on the back of her shirt to hold it together, but I couldn’t fit them together – indeed, they weren’t attached when I took her out of her box – and in the end I decided not to stress over it. I’m not going to be displaying her with her back turned to the front, anyway.

Without her top, her breasts aren’t quite as intimidating. They’re still big, but not as unrealistic as they appear while she is clothed.

The bottom of her suit has this curious circular cutout. It looks like she had some sort of wardrobe malfunction where the seat of her clothes got torn, but a closer look reveals that the cutout is actually part of its design. Quite odd.

A close-up look reveals a few manufacturing flaws, including a black speck on the inside of her right arm, a seam line under her breast and some odd gunk near her groin, in the fold of her right leg. It also shows the loving detail of her crotch. Nice touch.

Instead of a long spear, Queen’s Gate Sen gets a segmented bladed weapon. The core is made of flexible metal wire, allowing the weapon to be bent into any desired position. I’m not sure how durable the wire is, though, and I’m not planning on testing how much bending it can take before fracturing.

The blade of her weapon, which is nicely detailed.

As is her suit, which is reminiscent of the floral patterns on the original Senhime’s robe.

This version of Sen Tokugawa is a strange one, one that is doubly divorced from the anime character’s design. Her clothing, weapon, and even hair color have been changed from Niθ’s original concept, and the basic design is much more reflective of Yoshikazu Miwa’s artwork, so much so that this figure almost represents a whole new character. Placed side by side with Alter’s figure, they look almost nothing alike.

However, as much as I like Sen Tokugawa’s original design, I think I like this version better. A large part of that is my fondness for Synthetic Garden’s doujinshi, of which I own a few, but I think the combination of Miwa’s style, Senhime’s revealing clothing, her unusual weapon – and okay, her humongous tits – give the character a very unique look. I wasn’t confident at all that this figure was going to be any good, but now that I’ve taken her out of her box, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Here’s Alter’s Sen with MegaHouse’s Sen, showing the major differences between them.

And here’s Queen’s Gate Senhime with Queen’s Gate Yagyu Jubei. Same manufacturer, same series, same listed scale size, but very different body shapes. Although the characters had similar heights and body builds in the anime, Queen’s Gate Jubei looks like a waif next to Synthetic Garden Sen.

Doujinshi time! Here’s a few of the Synthetic Garden books I own. Miwa often collaborates with another artist named Blade, whose circle is named Galaxist. They’re sort of an odd couple in doujinshi – Miwa often draws full-figured, big-breasted girls and Blade almost always draws very young-looking, flat-chested girls. Nonetheless, they do share a fondness for drawing tentacle hentai, a suggestion that a love of tentacles can overcome all differences.

Here’s an indication that I ought to check which doujinshi I already own before ordering books.

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Time for more pillowcase show-and-tell. This one comes from Carnelian, surely one of the most famous illustrators in the anime world. She’s a veteran artist, having been around as long as I’ve been on the internet, which goes back to the mid-90s, but although she’s quite well-known, she’s never had the sort of commercial stature of someone like Tony Taka or even newer artists like redjuice or Huke. She’s contributed character designs to just a couple of mainstream anime – Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito probably being the most prominent – though H-anime fans will also remember her work in Moonlight Lady. Instead, her work is much more visible in the doujin community, where she is very active. In particular, there are a number of dakimakura covers featuring her art; this particular one was released last summer during Comiket 80 and depicts an original character named Lucrezia.

This dakimakura cover is, like many doujin pillowcases, made of two-way tricot – a smooth and stretchy lycra fabric – and measures 160 centimeters in length and 50 centimeters in width. It features front and rear views of the character, which is the scheme I like most when it comes to dakimakura covers. This side shows Lucrezia with a calm, imperturbed expression, wearing an attractive black dress with one arm curiously cuffed to her thigh.

Close up of those cuffs and some other stuff.

I really like the shading on her stockings; it gives them a kind of satin-like appearance that goes well with the rest of her otfit.

The reverse side is quite a bit raunchier, with all her naughty parts out for admiration.

Very nice detail in the cuffs. The tradeoff is not a lot of detail in her anatomical parts, I suppose. Some circles delight in providing exquisite detail there, like Illust Guerrilla did, but this is a more tasteful treatment. As far as an explicit dakimakura cover can be considered tasteful, anyway.

I quite like this pillowcase – in fact, it might be one of my two or three favorite pillowcases in my collection. It’s got several themes that I like, and the artwork is very beautiful, as much of Carnelian’s art is.

Though she’s created a lot of doujin work sold at Comiket, she’s also done some commercial work recently, including artwork for the Muv-Luv Alternative spinoff Schwarzesmarken. That series appears to be a story set in divided Germany, featuring lead character Katja Waldheim and her CO Irisdina Bernhard. As of yet, few of her character designs have received figure adaptations, though given that the last figure based on her art doesn’t sound like it turned out all that great, maybe that’s for the best.

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Anybody who’s read this site for a while knows that I like ero figures. And anybody who’s read this site for a while knows that I like big figures. Unfortunately, few figure manufacturers have made big ero figures – at least until recently. However, FREEing has stepped up to the plate to fill this niche, which is quite gratifying, particularly when the figure is as nice as Amane is.

Amane Shiratori is the lead girl from the h-game Anata no Shiranai Kangofu, or The Nurse You Don’t Know. Featuring artwork by Toshihide Sano, Good Smile Company’s product page describes her as the “heroine” but from what I can tell, she appears to be more rapebait than a heroine. The game received an anime adaptation courtesy of Milky Animation, and she’s now gotten a couple of figures – this one, a recolored version of this figure with a pink dress, and the older figure sculpted by Vispo. Warning: that link leads to some terrible pictures.

This figure is manufactured by FREEing, one of the companies under Good Smile Company’s aegis. Sculpted in a mighty 1/4 scale – God’s scale – she stands an impressive 35 centimeters tall, including her nurse cap. She comes with a bevy of accessories, including a telescoping hospital stand, a couple of plastic fluid packs, and surgical tubing.

Any discussion about this figure ought to begin with its size. Not many companies make 1/4 scale figures with any regularity, and even fewer make ero figures in that size, but happily, FREEing is filling that void with this figure and a couple of 1/4 scale figures of the Freezing girls. Amane is a huge figure with considerable shelf presence, particularly given her quality. Her size is also a drawback, however; she is, unsurprisingly, quite a heavy figure and because she attaches to her base by only one foot, her weight is leaning her towards her right side. I noticed the sole of her sandal has partially detached and since that foot is bearing all her weight, I’m going to have to repair that before it becomes a big problem.

FREEing has done an excellent job giving her a very sexy body sculpt. She’s full-figured with an adult body build rather than the teenaged – or primary school – look so common in anime. She looks like an attractive young woman, which is something I appreciate since even I sometimes feel really weird ogling anime girls that are ostensibly half my age.

Even though she, well, looks really slutty, with her tits and ass hanging right out for everyone to gawk at, the demure and friendly look on her face diverts attention from her lewd parts. But once your gaze moves part her tranquil look, it’s hard not to notice her tits and ass. Her breasts are large and the band-aids covering them up are removable. Her nipples don’t stand out much, though, thanks to a rather reserved point job. Her ass, however, is sublime. Manufacturers often give short shrift to the backsides of their girly figures but FREEing has done a commendable job with Amane’s rear. She’s got some odd-colored panties, though; they’re not quite white and not quite purple.

Her paint quality is less impressive, unfortunately. Her skin tone is quite flat, the same problem that seems to afflict Satellizer – though I wouldn’t know for sure since I haven’t taken her out of her box yet. It’s particularly noticeable on her face because the prototype figure had an attractive blush that the production figure lacks. I was quite disappointed by its disappearance at first but now, I guess it doesn’t bother me as much – her face takes on a different feel, with her apparent shyness replaced by serenity, which isn’t a bad change, per se.

One of the trademark aspect of Sano’s style is the inclusion of lips, which is rare to see in anime-style artwork and so makes his work easily recognizable. Amane’s lips are slightly parted, as if expressing surprise or starting to say something. It adds a bit to her personality, although I’m not exactly sure what.

Amane comes with a few display options. Her nurse cap is attached via a magnet in her head and is thus easily removable.

She also comes with glasses, as she also appears in some of the game graphics.

Many figures with glasses have empty frames, but in a very nice touch, Amane’s have plastic lenses.

The hospital stand telescopes to its full height. I didn’t take any pictures of the fluid packs but if you really want to see them, you can look at the official photo. A couple of lengths of surgical tubing extend out from them and dangle on the floor.

And of course, her dress is removable. Her castoff system isn’t too complicated, being that she’s not wearing a lot to start with, but it still took quite a bit of effort to get her dress over the stump of her right shoulder.

Many figures with castoff options have a peculiarly emaciated look when stripped of their clothes, and Amane isn’t an exception. Her waist is very pinched and her neck is conspicuously elongated. It’s clear that FREEing prioritized making her look good while clothed so while I like the idea of Amane clad only in her panties, I’m going to keep her dresesd. It’s not like her dress covers a whole lot, anyway.

For those collectors who wish to display her without clothes, FREEing thoughtfully includes a couple of lacy bands to cover up the detachment points of her upper arms. Speaking of lacy stuff, her stockings are made of lacy fishnet fabric material, which looks quite nice. Like real stockings, they tend to slip down her legs, though.

FREEing’s Amane Shiratori was a figure I was looking forward to ever since she debuted at Wonder Festival and I’m very pleased with how she turned out. A bit more body and facial blushing would have been welcome but even without, her massive size elevates her from a fine figure to a spectacular one. She manages to look respectable and affable even while being essentially half-nude, and her sexiness complements rather than overwhelms her agreeable expression. It’s still early in the year but I think Amane is already a solid candidate to end up in my five favorite figures list in December.

Here’s FREEing’s Amane with the Vispo-sculpted figure by Questioners. The older figure was one of my favorites but I don’t think it’s held up all that well with all the high-quality figures coming out these days.

Here’s how Amane looks in the game. The game has lots of good stuff, like bondage rape, gang rape, electrical rape, rape with toys …

And rape with medical devices, as this screencap from the anime shows. What’s up with Amane’s feet, though?

However, the series lacks the best kind of rape, which of course is tentacle rape. That’s a bit of a shame since tentacle rape improves any anime.

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One of the first anime figures I ever bought was Alpha’s Motoko Kusanagi Hard Disk Version. It’s cheaply-made and primitive by today’s standards, and it’s not a scale-size figure, but even so, I still like it, mainly because I like the character design. Scantily-clad female combat androids are a staple of science fiction anime and video games and, having grown up on that stuff, it’s a theme I like a lot. I hesitated for just a moment on ordering Lacia, since Good Smile Company sold this figure only through their online store and I always consider twice when it comes to paying for a figure up-front. However, after seeing her preview pictures, I felt that this was going to be a fine figure, and now that it’s here, my esteem for her has only grown.

Lacia is a character from BEATLESS, a light novel written by Satoshi Hase and illustrated by redjuice, who also designed Good Smile Company’s Racing Miku figure last year. The name of the series may refer to the fact that Lacia is an android who presumably lacks a heart and circulatory system. I think this figure was the first scale-size figure to be sold through Good Smile Company’s online store and this was my first shopping experience with them. Happily, the ordering and shipping process both went smoothly, unlike some customers’ experiences with one of their earthquake relief nendoroids.

Lacia is a 1/8 scale figure, albeit rather on the small end of that size. She’s about 18 centimeters tall but still takes up a large amount of space due to the impressive device she holds. In total, the figure is around 27 centimeters tall and 23 centimeters long.

The figure comes mostly ready for display, with just four pylons needing to be attached to the device. I had a good deal of difficulty fitting them, but they do stay secure if you attach them correctly, and I probably wasn’t lining them up correctly in the first place. Lacia herself attaches to her base via a single socket in her right foot, which is worrisome since she’s the heaviest part of the assembly. Hopefully that won’t develop into an issue in the future.

Lacia has a lot of cool points about her. Let’s start with the outfit: some thigh-high socks and a high-tech leotard adorned with panel lines comprise her costume. Her socks and sleeves are less elaborate but are painted in a high-gloss black, lending some fetishistic appeal to her image. Accentuating the sensuality of her design are her high heels, which seem grossly incongruous but look fantastic anyway.

Her face does not reveal much, as might be expected for a combat android. She’s quite pretty regardless, with a cold, intimidating, hypnotic gaze. I wonder if it would have been better if they had given her lips, though; her mouth looks a bit like an open slash through her face and maybe lips would’ve softened the comparison. Also, Lacia is plainly similar to Inori Yuzuriha, another of redjuice’s creations, and that character’s anime design has some very sexy lips.

Her base is a faceted piece of matte black plastic, which calls to mind the shape of a stealth fighter. Her device – called the Black Monolith – comes attached to it. Set behind its wielder, it delivers an ominous impression, its sharply-raked angles and abstract formlessness contrasting with the femininity of Lacia’s softly curved body as well as her impassivity.

And though Lacia’s pose is in itself collected and imperturbed, the angles of her body and the Black Monolith effect a dynamic look that generates a sense of energy about her. This is a common theme in redjuice’s artwork as well; for example, in Stupid Missiles – the first picture of his that I ever saw and still one of my favorites – the diagonal lines of the terrain and in the sky and the slant of the structures in the distance establish a feeling of tension and dynamism, even though the main subjects of the work are just sitting or standing around.

The ornate mechanical parts encircling her hips can be removed if desired; her left leg detaches so that they can be pulled off. Normally I would remove them, as I do with most of my figures where the opportunity exists to expose their crotches or backsides, but in this case, she seems less special somehow without them, so she’ll be keeping them on.

As befits a figure sold exclusively through Good Smile Company’s shop, Lacia’s packaging gets the VIP treatment; she comes in a neat black box which also includes this handsome book, ostensibly her owner’s manual. It contains some artwork by redjuice, including concept sketches for Lacia’s design, some background information regarding both the BEATLESS project and the design process of this figure, and an excerpt from the BEATLESS novel, which unfortunately is the only thing an English translation isn’t provided for.

The book of course includes the artwork which this figure was based off of. It also gives some explanation regarding Lacia’s history, her status as an hIE – or humanoid Interface Element – and some miscellaneous trivia about her – such as the fact that she needs to be kept moist and that ownership is established by inserting a finger into her Owner’s Recognition Unit. I like where this is going.

This is her device, a “huge black lump.” It is said that only her owner can unlock the full potential of this device. I think I’ve heard that before …

Lacia and buddies … that dude looks like someone I may have seen before … maybe in a recent anime …

Some preliminary sketches of Lacia. I kind of like this design; the long sleeves are pretty cool, as is the long hair.

Click for Deviantart.

Also included in the book is this image of Lacia. It’s very cool, particularly how Lacia’s wings are emerging from her ass rather than her back. Nothing wrong with upending convention from time to time.

And one last note: Lacia’s backside is really cute. No wings are provided, though.

Lacia is a great figure, one that I’m very happy to own. Her design is one that fans of sci-fi anime will find familiar, and combined with redjuice’s prowess, is very appealing. And while her youthful appearance is captivating, the Black Monolith is eye-catching in its angular menace and balances Lacia’s attractiveness. Though Lacia’s design is reminiscent of other characters from the genre – particularly Motoko Kusanagi, whose color palette she shares in large part – there aren’t many figures that look like this one, and this distinctiveness combined with her excellent design and Good Smile Company’s quality make this a fine figure indeed.

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Photography can be a funny thing. You sometimes hear people – and camera companies – minimize the difficulty of photography. After all, all you do is press a button and bam, you’ve got the shot. Much easier than, say, drawing or painting, right?

Well, no, or at least, the case is not as clear cut as it may appear. The illustrator starts with a blank sheet of paper and has full control over what goes on it. The photographer, in contrast, has much less control. When you put a camera to your eye to make a picture, you’ve got dozens of decisions to make. How should you arrange the elements of the picture? Where do you focus? What goes into the frame? What gets left out of the frame? Then there’s lighting. Color. Perspective. And then there are the technical factors: what shutter speed? What aperture? And if things are moving, you’ve got to worry about shooting at the right fraction of a second. With all the factors that go into a good photo, it’s a wonder that we aren’t paralyzed before snapping a shot.

A skilled illustrator can usually draw a picture pretty close to what she originally envisioned, and if whim and imagination carry her vision someplace else during the process, she can account for that. However, even a world-class photographer will encounter difficulty capturing her initial vision in a RAW file. Sometimes things just don’t work out and you have no clue why. It happened to me just last evening. Last night, I shot off a couple dozen test shots, tweaked exposure, shifted angles, moved my lights around. I switched from a wide angle to a telephoto to a zoom lens racked to somewhere in between the two primes. It wasn’t working. I powered lights on and off, went from a big softbox to a small one to no softbox, put CTO gels on, took them off, and finally, sat down, a quizzical expression on my face, studying the image playback on the camera’s LCD, while all this time Lacia scowled back at me as if to say, “Bitch, you ain’t taking my picture.” It happens. There’s a lot that goes into a photograph.

Sometimes, though, things work out pretty well. Maybe not exactly as you had first planned, but that’s the thing about photography. When things don’t work, you’ve got to be able to reverse course and come up with another idea, sometimes in an instant. But when things do go well, you think, “Man, this is pretty cool stuff.”

The Idea
I’ve used water splashes in a few pictures, but I’ve never really been completely satisfied with them. Maybe my favorite shot in that category was the first picture in my Kurisu Makise post, but it’s always bothered me how it’s not a very sharp picture. Not that sharpness is a requirement for a quality picture, of course, but for this sort of close-up shot, I think a sharply-rendered water drop would have significantly enhanced the effect of the image. But I didn’t have enough depth of field to get both Kurisu’s face and the drop in focus, and I was seeing noticeable diffraction effects at f/22, so f/16 was as narrow an aperture setting as I wanted to use. I didn’t really like the Haruka shot since it looks like a solid pillar of ice growing out of her back. And I’m not too pleased with the Kureha picture either because the water looks like it’s being ejected out of her backside. I wonder if people were too polite to point that out.

A few years ago, I came across this video by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis and a special effects studio in which they made a picture of a martial artist throwing a punch into a giant splash of water. It was one of the most awesome pictures I’d seen and as I learned more about photography, I thought maybe I could do something a little like that, with my figure interacting with the water in a way that looks cooler and less artificially cheesy than the giant ice spike jutting out of Haruka’s butt.

I needed a suitable figure for this shot and the first two candidates were Good Smile Company’s old dark elf and Alter’s Sen Tokugawa. The idea would be I’d photograph a splash of water and then composite over their outstretched hand, giving their gesture an added element of appeal. I’d already written posts for both of those, however, and as time passed I lost interest in the idea. Then last summer, as I was debating whether to order Miku Append, the idea came back to mind. The upward rise of her hair is visually striking, and I wondered how it would look if I set up a shot where it looked like her hair was exploding into water. The idea sparked my enthusiasm and I decided to order the figure.

I’m not a very artistic person. I studied engineering in school and I work as a computer programmer at my day job. I’m much more comfortable with checklists, flowcharts, and plans of action than questions of philosophy and beauty. I’m a lot better at handling problems that have solutions than pondering things that have no answer – things like photo composition, for instance. Fortunately for me, the challenges presented by photographing water drops are in large part technical and I’d already thought of potential solutions to most of them. Unfortunately for me, the unanswerable questions – like composition – don’t go away no matter how technical a photo setup gets.

The Setup and Necessary Equipment
The setup for this shot was a lot less complex than for something like Sasara’s review. At first, I decided I’d go with abstract geometric shapes in the background, and I went with a blue color, thinking that it would provide an attractive complement to Miku’s black, white, and green color scheme. Later I went with a black backdrop.

Since I wanted the water to fly upwards, the figure had to be hung upside down. I built a platform from a wood plank and some threaded metal rod that I had laying around. It wasn’t particularly stable since I only gave it three legs, which had the potential to cause problems down the line, but I was too cheap to buy a fourth rod. The initial backdrop was made out of some white foam packing material.

For this sort of shot, you pretty much need to use photographic flashes. To freeze the motion of a large animal – like a dog running across a field, or a human being – you typically need a shutter speed of something like 1/500 or 1/1000 sec. However, when you’re shooting water drops, the frame is a lot smaller and you’re going to see motion blur at a shutter speed of 1/500 sec. You need a much faster shutter speed than that to freeze the movement of those drops.

Flashes can give you that faster shutter speed, though in an indirect way. Most DSLR cameras restrict shutter speeds to about 1/200 or 1/250 sec when you use a flash; this is because that’s as fast as the camera can sync the opening of its shutter to the flash pulse. If you’ve got a DSLR, you can test this yourself; turn it to manual mode, dial in a shutter speed of 1/1000 sec or so, deploy the popup flash, and press the shutter button down halfway. You’ll see the shutter speed reset to your camera’s sync speed. However, for freezing objects in motion, we can get around this limitation through a quirk in the way that flashguns operate. Many flashes have adjustable power settings, expressed as a fraction of maximum power. Flashguns actually modulate power by varying the duration of the flash pulse. Flashguns fire at the same initial brightness, regardless of the power setting, but at lower power, an electronic component (a thyristor or IGBT) in the flash cuts off power to the flash tube after a certain period of time. For example, at maximum power, a high-end flash like a Nikon SB-900 or Canon 580EX II fires a pulse that lasts about 1/800 sec. At 1/8 power, the pulse lasts about 1/5000 sec. At the minimum 1/128 power, the pulse lasts less than 1/30000 sec.

Take a picture of your desk at a shutter speed of 1/200 sec. It will almost certainly be completely black. When you use a flash at, say, 1/32 power, your camera sees 1/20000 sec of light followed by 99/20000 seconds of darkness, meaning that although your camera’s maximum sync speed may be 1/200 or 1/250 sec, your image has an effective shutter speed of 1/20000 sec – far faster than your camera’s fastest shutter speed setting and fast enough to freeze the movement of a single water drop with no motion blur at all.

That’s one technical problem accounted for – the easiest one, since I already have a bunch of flashguns and I’ve been using them for a while now. There’s still the issue with depth of field, but I had an idea to solve that as well. Adobe introduced a function called focus stacking in Photoshop CS3, where you take a series of photographs focused at different points and then merge them into a single image, giving you a deeper depth of field while not needing to shoot at a very narrow aperture. I also plan on generating the water splashes on her hair by stacking images and selectively masking them to ensure full water coverage of each twintail.

So besides flashguns, you need Photoshop for this image. A note about Photoshop: this image is by far the most photoshopping I’ve ever performed on a photo. Typically, I don’t do a lot of post-processing; my general scheme is to get exposure right in Lightroom, increase global color saturation a bit (usually +3 to +5 in Photoshop), increase red tones in highlights by +4, and sharpen. But I’m not opposed in the least to photoshopping. My belief is that a photographer’s main imperative is to make the image that is in your head and if photomanipulation is part of that process, then go for it. My only beef with photoshopping is when it is done badly; bad photoshoppery sticks out like a man wearing a kufi at a Klan rally.

So those are the technical issues involved in making this image. How did the actual picture-taking go?

Attempt #1 (850 images)

The image I envisioned was one looking at Miku straight-on. I not only wanted water to be flying above her head, I also wanted to have two drops of water colliding in front of her so that she would be looking right at the impact point. I figured that timing a collision like that would be nearly impossible, so I planned on photographing that effect on a black background and then merging it in front of her face in Photoshop later on.

Here’s the platform Miku’s dangling off of. My idea was almost confounded by Max Factory’s unusually-shaped base. Presuming that Miku would come with the typical flat circular base that most figures get, I planned on securing her to the platform with a couple of A-clamps. When I unboxed the figure, I found she had this tiny base with an inclined surface and a couple of fragile-feeling struts underneath. I wound up using a couple feet of gaffer tape to stick Miku to the platform. Have I talked about how awesome gaffer tape is? It’s absolutely amazing. A bit expensive, but it’s way, way better than masking or duct tape.

O hai

So here’s Miku hanging upside down while I work out exposure. As mentioned, flash power has to be kept fairly low to ensure that the light pulse is brief enough to get sharp water drops. My main flash unit – a 580EX II – is quite powerful for a hotshoe flash, so I’m not too worried about not having enough power, particularly because I’m shooting at a fairly wide aperture – f/3.5 – for a lot of these shots.

I’m pouring the water out of a couple of soda bottles. I tried to use some twisted-up aluminum foil to block part of the mouths of the bottles in an attempt to break up the water flow, since I didn’t want that ice pillar effect. It didn’t work too well, though; I probably would’ve been better off just covering up the mouth with my finger and agitating the bottle as I poured.

Note that for these images where I’m pouring water onto her hair, I’m only going to be using the parts of the image where the water is splashing onto her hair. The rest is going to be masked out so it’s not a big deal that part of the bottle is obscuring a portion of Miku’s body.

My camera was on a tripod, set to burst-shooting drive mode, manual focus, and I used a remote shutter release. It was quite a pain to trip the shutter, by the way; since I was holding a soda bottle in each hand and the cable release was on the floor, under my foot. When I poured the water, I used my big toe to press the shutter button. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds to coordinate all this, particularly since the cable release’s button sometimes got stuck. Canon’s Rebel cameras have a self timer-initiated burst shooting mode but their higher-end cameras do not, and I wish that those cameras did, since it would’ve come in really handy for this sort of shoot.

With water, basically getting the shot involves a tremendous amount of luck, and that means shooting a ton of pictures. Each trial involved pouring water onto Miku or squeezing the eyedroppers, shooting off three or four shots, cleaning water off of Miku, and refilling my water containers. Not particularly thrilling but at least I had the procedure more or less refined so that I didn’t have to think too much about it.

I focused on the center of Miku’s twintails and I noticed that the water splashing on the front and rear parts of her hair is out of focus. That’s no surprise – I’m shooting at f/3.5, after all. I’m too lazy to go back into Live View and refocus, so I just stop down to f/9.

Which, of course, causes the background to go dark. Oops. I figured I could just get around that in Photoshop. Hmm … no.

After finishing up the shoot, I load the images into Photoshop, auto-align and auto-stack the images to perform focus stacking, and load up one of the shots where water is flying off her hair. And then I realize that since the background is darker in that shot, it’s going to take forever to mask it out. And I realize that I’d have to do that for every shot all the way down each of her twintails. And I realize she’s not even looking at the camera. I also took some pictures of water splashing on a black background and after copying it in as a layer, I realized that I don’t have any idea how to blend it in. So … not much hope there. I decided I couldn’t salvage anything from this shoot and stopped working on the picture.

Attempt #2 (819 images)

Though my first attempt ended in complete failure, I didn’t think it was a waste of time. The most significant thing was that I felt that the idea was sound and that the solutions to the previously-mentioned technical problems were sound. I decided to give it another try.

The basic setup remained the same. I did move in a little closer to get a tighter framing and to reduce the depth of field since I planned on shooting at f/4.5 the whole time. I also ditched the idea of getting two water drops colliding in front of Miku; this time, I decided I’d photograph water squirting out of eyedroppers in front of Miku’s face and hope that something interesting would happen.

Here’s how focus stacking works. The left image is focused on the rearmost part of Miku’s hair, the second image is focused on the base of her twintails, the third image is focused on her face, and the fourth image is focused on the tip of the strip floating in front of her. Four more images were used to generate the composite; the more images you use, the more accurate the stacking process is. Run Auto-Align Layers and Auto-Blend Layers in Photoshop and you get an image that is sharp from necktie to hairtip:

The stacking operation is remarkably accurate. It adds a little space on the sides, which is easily cropped out. The next step is to get the water on her hair.

Here’s how I got the water effect. I picked out the images that had splash effects that I liked. The picture above is one of them.

I pasted the image on top of the focus-stacked image and masked out everything except for the part of the splash that I wanted to keep. I repeated this process for each image that had a splash I wished to use.

Here’s a splash on her other twintail. After I was done, I got an image that looked like this:

Now that the water effects on her hair are done, I perform basically the same operation to get some water flying around in front of her. The idea here is that I want something interesting to happen in front of her face. If I can get a couple of water drops to splash into each other in front of her, that’d be great, but I’m looking for something that is interesting in general. To do this, I point a couple of eyedroppers at each other and squeeze them.

This is probably the best shot out of over 600 attempts. Getting two eyedroppers aimed at each other is way, way more difficult than I thought it would be, even though they’re only a few inches apart.

It’s no wonder I couldn’t get two drops to collide; the streams from each eyedropper are repelling each other! I’ve got no idea why this happens but I saw this sort of thing quite a bit.

After merging in a lot more images, masking, and performing my usual post-processing routine, I got this image, which was pretty close to what I had envisioned. And then … I decided I didn’t like it. I’d managed to solve the technical problems I had encountered but the artistic aspects of the picture bothered me. The composition is poor; Miku’s face is smack in the middle of the photo, which is a weird place for it. The way her legs are cut off at the knees is awkward. The thing I disliked the most is her stare, which is eye-level and simultaneously vacant and disconcertingly intense. I thought this was the image I wanted to make but in the end, it wasn’t what I wanted. Time to go back to the drawing board, this time with more thought spent on the image’s composition.

Later, I put Miku on my desk and took a few quick test shots to experiment with different angles. The image I liked the most was this one, where she’s angled away from the camera. After using bright blue backgrounds for the other two shoots, I really liked this darker background and thought that it provided a more appropriate mood for a figure like this. The one thing I didn’t like is the prominence of her chin; to minimize that I knew that I needed to shoot at a higher angle – or, as the figure was suspended upside down, a lower one.

Attempt #3 (734 images)

So with that in mind, I set up for another shoot. The lighting system is basically the same – a snooted rimlight on each side to give her body a hard-edged outline, and a key light short-lighting her face with a LumiQuest Ultrasoft modifier.

I shot off a bunch of images with focus adjusted in increments from rear to front and focus-stacked the images, as I did with the earlier shoot.

I like the composition of this image far more than the earlier photo. I put Miku a bit off-center since I felt that balanced her hair. She’s looking out of the frame; sometimes people say that subjects ought to be looking into the frame but the way she’s sculpted, I think this framing works better. Also, the bottom frame border set at mid-thigh and just below her fingertips is more natural than cutting her off at her knees.

Sometimes you run into unexpected surprises while shooting. After I had shot the images to perform focus-stacking, I placed a towel – visible in the setup shot – to catch water being ejected from the eyedropper. The towel reflected light coming from the flashguns and filled in the left side of her body with warm light. I hadn’t planned on that at all but I liked how it looked, so I incorporated it into the image. Also, light reflected off of her necktie and filled the lower part of her face with a soft glow, which was something that really pleased me, particularly because I didn’t anticipate it.

The procedure for getting the water splashes on her hair is exactly as it was before; here’s a look in Lightroom at some of the images I selected for masking.

And here’s how her right hair tail looks after compositing and masking images.

I still wanted something to be happening in front of her face. A year or so ago, I took a picture of Kureha that I don’t think I ever published here, but I uploaded it to Tsuki-board on a whim. I liked the effect of the water drops seemingly flying horizontally and then splashing spectacularly. I wanted to incorporate that idea on this shot of Miku. On the earlier shot, I used Kureha’s body to generate the splash effect; on Miku’s shot, I wadded up a little piece of adhesive putty and stuck it to her necktie to disrupt the path of the flying water.

There’s that U-turning water stream again. Weird how that happens.

Here’s two of the photos used to generate the water flying in front of her.

While looking through the images, I came across this one, which I liked a lot. An eyeline connecting the subject to an object generates immediate interest in whatever is being looked at, in this case a fairly large globe of water. The only thing I didn’t like was that the drop is slightly out of focus. I found another image with a sharp drop of water and pasted it over the blurry one. A few people might consider that cheating. I don’t particularly care. I shot over two thousand images in this sequence, I wasn’t going to shoot off another five hundred just because of a dubious ethical issue.

With everything merged and masked off, I finally arrived at this image, which I am fairly happy with. It’s not perfect, but it’s very close to what I intended to create.

One thing I was aiming for in the composition was distinct and easily-identifiable lines. Miku’s pose is very vertical, with a diagonal line running through her hair, and I also wanted a horizontal line going across the lower part of the frame. Horizontal lines often convey a sense of stability, and as I knew that the top half of the frame was going to be much more energetic, I thought that the contrast would present an interesting dynamic, even though nobody’s going to consciously think about that.

Final Thoughts
This image required quite a bit of effort to create, but the process actually went fairly smoothly, apart from my inability to coordinate two eyedroppers. The tricky parts were thinking about how to frame the picture and getting everything organized. The Photoshop side of it was, by comparison, very easy – though a bit tedious – to do.

While I worked on the final image, I debated whether to include that hook-shaped stream of water emerging out of her left twintail. On one hand, it looks out of place, as it’s not moving in the same direction as the rest of the water. But as I looked at the image, I thought to myself, “That looks kinda like a tentacle” and I decided that I had to include it. Maybe it detracts from the image in an objective sense, but I wanted to put a little bit of myself into the picture. I like tentacles. It had to stay in.

A random thought: my enthusiasm for photography has grown considerably since I stopped reading camera gear forums.

Now, back to Lacia.

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#5. Sasara Kusugawa

Volks’s Moekore figures are hit-or-miss in my experience. Sasara, fortunately, is a fantastic figure, exuding confidence and sexiness in equal measure. Of all the To Heart 2 figures out there – and there’s a helluva lot of them – Sasara ranks as among the best, and given the price premium this figure is commanding on the secondary market, I’m surely not alone in that assessment.

#4. Lacia from BEATLESS

The newest figure in my collection, her inclusion in this list wasn’t certain until today but it was by no means a hasty decision. I’ve been looking forward to this figure since the sample reviews went online and it’s as good as I hoped it would be. Her outfit is tremendously appealing, particularly the high heels, which she makes look right despite how incongruous they ought to be, and I’ve also got this thing for purple hair.

#3. Saber Alter from Fate/stay night

As good as Sasara is, I don’t think she’s even the best armored girl figure to be released this year. That honor goes to Good Smile Company’s Saber Alter, which forgoes Sasara’s leg-baring sexiness and replaces it with badass attitude. Is this the best Saber figure ever? I think it’s either this or Saber Lily; who you got?

#2. Rin Tohsaka from Fate/stay night

Collectors expressed doubts about Good Smile Company’s Rin Tohsaka – her shirt was too glossy, the eyes on her prototype were badly misaligned. However, in the end GSC came through and the final figure is absolutely beautiful. Her sculpt is stunning, her attitude is defiant, and the result is, I think, one of the best figures ever made. Any other year, I’d call it my favorite. But not this year.

#1. Dizzy from Guilty Gear X2

This one is a fairly obvious choice, though I did have to think about it for a little bit. Truthfully, if I had never played Guilty Gear, I might’ve picked Rin here instead. Objectively, I like the Rin figure a bit better; the sculpt is a bit more appealing and Rin’s size is much more attractive than Dizzy’s, who has one of the smallest 1/8 scale bodies Alter has sculpted. However, Dizzy is one of my favorite video game characters and that’s all the tilt that this decision requires. Dizzy is my favorite figure of this year. Looking forward to 2012, a Mu-12 figure would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

Overall, I think it’s been a great year for figure collectors. Last year, the list wasn’t too hard to put together – though in retrospect, I might’ve bumped Momohime off the list, added Sora Kasugano, and if I had received Kiriko Hattori earlier, that figure would’ve been #1. This year, I had to put some thought into the ranking and it was very difficult to leave off figures like Fate Testarossa, Junko Hattori, Chie, Matabei, and Triela.

Let’s take a look at what a few individual manufacturers did during this last year.

Alter is, by general consensus, the best manufacturer of scale-size anime figures, and they had a pretty good year. However, I can’t say I was as excited by their product range this past year as I have been in years prior. Consider the source breakdown of their 2011 lineup:

2011
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha – 4 figures (+2 re-releases, +1 limited edition)
Strike Witches – 3 figures
Bakemonogatari – 2 figures
A Certain Scientific Railgun – 2 figures (+2 re-releases)
K-On! – 2 figures (+2 re-releases)
Fate/stay night – 2 figures
Guilty Gear X2 – 1 figure (+1 re-release)
Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls – 0 figures (+2 limited edition)
Okami-san and her Seven Companions – 1 figure
Shining Wind – 1 figure
Working! – 1 figure
Yosuga no Sora – 1 figure

Here’s the thing: almost all of these properties have someone else making figures of those characters right now. Good Smile Company is making figures of the Bakemonogatari characters that are at least as good as Alter’s figures, and quite possibly superior. I get Kotobukiya’s Strike Witches figures confused with Alter’s all the time. Same with their casual clothes Nanoha figures. And the same with their Railgun figures. Wait; I take that back, I can remember the difference between the two Saten figures, because Alter’s Saten-san has a head shaped like a melon and Kotobukiya’s does not.

Compare that lineup to their product range from 2009:

2009
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha – 4 figures (+2 re-releases)
Tower of Druaga – 2 figures
Teppen Toppa Gurren Lagann – 2 figures
Zero no Tsukaima – 2 figures
Bamboo Blade – 1 figure
Beat Blades Haruka – 1 figure
Demonbane – 1 figure
Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls – 1 figure
Kara no Kyoukai – 1 figure
Makai Tenshi Djibril – 1 figure
Penguin Musume Heart – 1 figure
Persona 4 – 1 figure
Sengoku Rance – 1 figure
Xenosaga – 1 figure

You used to be able to count on Alter to produce figures from eroge, obscure shows, and other sources that you’d never heard of but recently, most of their figures come from very mainstream series. Houmei is possibly the least-known character they made a figure of last year, but every figure collector has heard of Shining Wind. Dizzy is possibly the least-known character they made a figure of but one can’t really call Guilty Gear an obscure series, being that it’s on a half-dozen platforms and is internationally renowned.

What’s Alter got on tap for next year? Another Nanoha figure, another Strike Witches figure, and another Samurai Girls figure, among other things. Hopefully they’ll mix things up and surprise us.

FREEing has made a bunch of 1/4 scale figures in the past, mostly of Lucky Star characters, but they’ve recently released a number of 1/4 scale ero figures, including a couple from Freezing (Satellizer review is pending here) and two figures of Shiratori Amane (review also pending here). That’s a great trend and I hope they keep it up – but I also hope that they make some of those Freezing figures stand up rather than lie down, because I’ve got no shelf space available for Satellizer, let alone the entire West Genetics student body.

What a difference a year makes. In 2010, I bought only one Good Smile Company figure – the Animation Version of Black Rock Shooter – and immediately regretted it because her price plummeted to 2,500 yen a few weeks after she was released. And then there was that problem with the star … which I still haven’t placed on her ass, by the way. But they’ve had a great 2011. Their Fate/stay night figures are amazing, Junko Hattori is, in my view, the best Queen’s Gate figure, and Triela and Nadeko Sengoku are also superb. They’ve also reached out to the international community, offering an English version of their company blog and taking overseas orders in their store. Maybe the biggest dud in their catalog are the actsta figures, which are rather undersized and hugely overpriced for what you get, particularly given that you can get a Figma for about a third of the price. Oh wait, there was one other dud, a most mysterious one that still demands clarification:

What the shizzle? And yes, that is an actual tweet from the Doggfather hisself. So what’s that about? Where’s my 1/8 scale Snoop Dogg figure? Lacia needs an owner, you know.

Kotobukiya is perhaps the most consistent of all figure makers in that their stuff usually isn’t terrible and it usually isn’t outstanding. A curious thing is how similar their product lineups are to a couple of other manufacturers: Alter does Nanoha figures in casual wear, Kotobukiya does figures in casual wear. Max Factory does figures of Shining Wind characters in swimsuits, Kotobukiya does figures of Shining Wind characters in swimsuits. They pretty much did what they’ve always done: pump out nice but not particularly ambitious figures of popular characters.

A second interesting trend is how hard they’re pushing their Bishoujo line. They must be pretty good sellers for them but personally, I think I like Yamashita’s artwork more than the figures themselves. On that note, one wonders if they’re monopolizing all his time or something, since it seems like they’re the only ones making figures based on his artwork now.

Every Wonder Festival, Orchid Seed shows up with a bunch of artwork showing off what they plan to make figures of. We’re still waiting on a lot of those. They had a really quiet year; Super Sonico was nice and Eleanor Mercer was very cute, but lately, they’ve been scheduling recolored versions of older figures. One wonders if effects from the calamitous earthquake or some other problem is disrupting things over there. It seems like we’ve been seeing that figure of Ignis in the wedding dress with the bouquet-hilted sword forever, and I’m still hoping they’ll make that dark elf figure from Lineage II.

Perhaps the most eclectic manufacturer in the hobby, Yamato’s catalog is more diverse than the We Are The World rehearsal and less consistent than Tim Tebow. They’ve got mecha toys, including some of the best Macross Valkyrie toys out there. They’ve got big-ass vmf50 dolls, of which I’m a big fan. They’ve got PVC anime figures of wildly varying quality and polystone figures based on Western fantasy art, also of wildly varying quality. They’re bringing back 1/7 or 1/8 scale poseable figures. I think I have more affection for Yamato than most collectors, but I didn’t buy many of their figures. I did get Heat Blade, which was finally released after a very lengthy delay. I also got Yukihime, whose review is still pending. Most of the Yamato stuff I got was vmf50 clothing. And although it’s not a Yamato product, this is a good time to bring up the tentacle stand again, just because it’s that awesome.

That’s that for 2011. Happy new year everyone. Next review goes up in a few days but for now, here’s some bonus pictures for the photographers out there.

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Happy Christmas to everybody. Nominally this is a time to celebrate with one’s friends and family but we all know it’s also a time to buy lots of really cool stuff. And since this site is all about figures, let’s take a look at some figures that look pretty cool and are worth some money.

March

Fio from Metal Slug
A rather surprising choice to make a figure of, Fio is from the somewhat obscure but fan-favorite run-and-gun shooter Metal Slug. Despite not being a high-profile title, and despite the comatose state of the Contra genre, the Metal Slug franchise has at times received unlooked-for boosts, such as when Metal Slug 3 came out on the original Xbox. I bought that game and enjoyed it, though I was pretty bad at it. I liked to play as Eri; I don’t think I ever used Fio. However, I’m thinking about ordering this figure, since it looks pretty cool, I liked Metal Slug 3, and maybe they’ll make an Eri figure sometime in the future.

Yui Takamura from Muv-Luv Alternative Total Eclipse
Another figure of the heroine from Total Eclipse, this one comes hot on the heels of Alphamax’s figure. That figure dressed her up in stockings and her underpants. This figure dresses her up in a kimono and her underpants. That one gave her a gun to hold, so at least she looked like a military girl – sort of – but this one makes Yui look like a traditional Japanese woman, which I suppose she is. Aside from driving a gigantic mech during her day job, anyway. I’ve got this one preordered, but I’m hoping that someone will make figures of the Total Eclipse characters in their pilot suits. I’m also really hoping that Yui doesn’t turn out to be a snotty bossy type in the upcoming anime adaptation. I’ve got a bad feeling I’m going to be disappointed.

White Cat from Planet of the Cats
I’m on the record as disliking animal ears and tails on anime characters. And I do, but I’ve preordered this figure anyway. There’s always a set of tradeoffs when it comes to things that appeal to me. I like cute anime girls that wear tiny swimsuits. I don’t like animal ears. In this case, what I like supersedes what I don’t like. It’s sort of like when the Lakers play the Heat. I hate both teams. But I like seeing the Lakers lose so when they play, I’ma cheer for the Heat. Actually, what I really cheer for is for an asteroid to obliterate both teams but in lieu of that, I’m going to cheer for the Heat to win. And for LeBron to blow out his Achilles.

April

Selvaria from Valkyria Chronicles
This is Alter’s second figure of the character from Valkyria Chronicles. This one puts her in a swimsuit, albeit with sword and dagger and showerhead at the ready. I’m not sure if I’m going to order this figure, mainly because she’s got an elongated physique that I find a bit off-putting, and she’s also got sort of an odd face. On the other hand, I dig that chest. And the underboob. And those nipples. And I’m not averse to strange faces and unusual proportions, since I have gangsta lean Saber and she’s got a fairly odd face herself. I’m going to have to think about this one a bit harder; she’s currently the only figure I’m interested in scheduled for April, so that’s a plus in her favor. And so is that chest. Man, in the last thirty seconds, my opinion of this figure has improved dramatically.

May

Alina Bosconovitch from Tekken
At first glance, I like this figure a lot – colorful, gots that mecha girl thing going on, really nice panties. But man, those eyes. The promo shots stay away from close ups but the Moeyo preview gets in close and man, those eyes! They look like they’re about to start shooting lasers out of them. Which they could, I mean, since she’s a robot and all, but still, that doesn’t mean that’s what I want to see on a figure. So I’m thinking about it. She’s got a lot of good stuff but lately I’ve been thinking that if I don’t like a figure’s face, I ought to not buy it, no matter how good the rest of it is.

Incidentally, has anyone ever seen a Japanese figure blog review one of the Bishoujo figures? I kinda wonder how well these sell in Japan versus the rest of the world.

Nanoha Takamchi from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Another swimsuit girl from Alter. And another Nanoha figure from Alter. It looks very good. I like the hoodie. Cute, sporty bikini and nice legs. I don’t really have much more to say about it, even in a single paragraph. I’ve got it preordered and I really like it but even so, I’ve got the feeling that post will be the shortest review I’ll write next year.

Panty from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
It took a little longer than I expected for a major figure maker to produce a quality version of the Panty & Stocking characters, but this one looks great. I’ve preordered it though I’ll be honest, it’s sort of a conservative figure of Panty given the kind of show she comes from. And not a single pantyshot to be found among the promo photos? C’mon, man. I guess I’ll have to build the stage and pole myself.

Saber Extra from Fate/extra
Another Saber! But this one isn’t the usual Saber – she’s brash, cocky, and holds a jagged sword. And she’s not even British, she’s … well, from the continent. I bought the game recently and it doesn’t feature the most polished gameplay mechanics, but I still enjoyed it. I picked Saber to be my servant and liked her character, much more than I like the better-known blue dress Saber. But I’m not sure if this is the figure I want of her. It looks great – I like it a lot, particularly the face, but it’s listed at 18 centimeters tall, which seems really short. I might wait and see what else comes out. Hopefully someone makes a figure of good, larged-sized version of Saber Bride, too; her outfit is absolutely awesome.

Saber from Fate/zero
This one is blue dress Saber, though she’s not wearing a blue dress and as far as I can tell, nothing separates Saber and Saber Extra visually aside from their choice of outfits. I’m going to get this figure, along with a very large fraction of figure collectors worldwide, since, well, it looks nice. I wish it were 1/7 scale to keep it in line with Good Smile Company’s other Fate figures, though. Yeah, it’d be more expensive and it would take up more shelf space, but let’s be honest, for a figure like this, you’d save up your money and you’d clear out all the room that it needs.

Super Sonico from Nitroplus
One of the things I enjoy about writing these preorder outlook posts is that I get to talk about a wide variety of characters. Lately, though, it seems like I’ve been writing a lot about Nanoha and Super Sonico. I guess I can’t complain because I keep buying their figures. I’ve got one Super Sonico figure on the shelf, Yamato’s figure still boxed up and waiting for a review, a big-ass doll, Gift’s lewd one on preorder, and I’ve got this one already paid for. It’s really cute. But man, you know, it’s Sonico, so chances are, you already know how you feel about her.

June

Hotori Yoshii from Native Creator’s Collection
Ah, now here’s a neat figure. Native’s used a few existing properties as a source of figures – like Nana to Kaoru, Genmukan, and Nitroplus’s mascot – but many of their figures have been based off of artwork. This one looks great. I like just about everything about it. Maybe the only thing I’d change would be to make it 1/6 scale instead of 1/7. But it still looks great. Biker Saber is the figure everyone is looking forward to but me, this one might be the one I’m most excited for.

Ignis from Jingai Makyou
Yamato’s a really eclectic manufacturer – they do PVC figures, polystone figures, figures from Western artwork, mecha toys, giant-sized dolls, and now they’re doing 1/7 scale action figures. Actually, they’re covering old ground – they released a series of 23-centimeter tall action figures under their Variable Motion Figure series a few years back. I don’t remember them being a huge success, though, and they appropriated the name for their vmf50 doll lineup. But here they go again, and this time, I might buy this one. Ignis looks pretty good here, and maybe her poseability will be useful in staging photo shoots. I wish she were a bit larger, though; I’m still trying to find a good running mate for the President. (I was thinking of maybe getting Azone’s Erio Touwa for that role, but she kinda lacks the intimidation factor that I’m looking for.)

TBA

Nagisa from Phantasy Star Portable 2
Certainly one of the most eye-catching figures to be shown off in a while, Nagisa is a great-looking figure that I’ve already ordered. But let me make an aside here and ask, does anybody do a better job of ruining their franchises than Sega? Back during my childhood, I was a huge Nintendo fanboy – up until I played Phantasy Star II on my cousin’s Genesis. Then I became a huge Sega fanboy, and I’d still say that I am, even though Sega makes it really hard to be one. They took my favorite series of tactical RPGs and turned them into harem-centric games with generic Tony Taka art. And baking, or so I’ve heard. They re-launched Golden Axe with a game that was, by most accounts, an atrocity. They completely abandoned Streets of Rage, Panzer Dragoon, Jet Set Radio, and Skies of Arcadia. They keep trying to bring Sonic the Hedgehog into the 21st century – even though it’s 2011. God, this makes me hate the video game industry.

And of course, as I write this, that terrible Modern Warfare 3 commercial comes on television and I hate the game industry even more. It’s a good thing I don’t really buy many of them anymore – not just because the industry sucks, but also because I’d have to buy fewer figures.

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Alter kicked off 2011 with Fate Testarossa and yet another figure of the blonde mage is among those that will close this year. In fact, Alter released five figures of Fate in 2011 alone, demonstrating that she is one of their favorite characters. Their love affair with the lightning wizard will surely continue unabated, as Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force is still untapped and more significantly, the second movie is on the way, with a new costume for Fate. Admittedly, it looks quite like her old costume with just a few changes but that certainly will not deter figure makers and Fate’s fans will certainly not object.

All of Alter’s recent Fate figures have been sculpted in 1/7 scale and this one is no different. The distance between the base and the highest part of Fate’s hand is about 23.5 centimeters, so the figure is reasonably large. She comes with a white plastic base that lacks the famous Engrish that Alter provided on the StrikerS figure bases.

This figure is labeled as coming from the first Nanoha film. It’s been a while since I watched it but I really don’t remember Fate ever wearing a bikini in the movie. Nor do I remember her smiling much and to be honest, it’s a bit strange seeing Fate smiling here. She’s a gloomy girl and for good reason – she goes to work and gets beat up by Nanoha, and then she comes home and gets beat up by her mom. She doesn’t have a lot to be happy about. And she certainly doesn’t have time to be going to the beach.

Apropos or not, she’s wearing a swimsuit, which is quite cute. It reminds me a lot of Alter’s old swimsuit Saber figure, with the same white color and even a similar low-rise style. I would’ve taken pictures of them together except my Saber figure snapped its base pegs years ago and I haven’t fixed that yet.

While her bikini is cute, I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly flattering on her, since she’s got the body build of a very young girl. That’s no surprise, of course, being that Fate is nine years old here, but she doesn’t have much in the way of a sharply defined waist or curvy hips. Strictly speaking, neither does the Phantom Minds figure, but although both Fates have the same physique, that figure has a sleeker look, probably because she’s wrapped in glossy black latex.

Curiously, her bikini buttom is cut more conservatively than her usual barrier jacket outfit. It kinda feels like it should be more revealing; Fate’s backside is one of the reasons people watch the show in the first place and maybe it should have been given more prominence here.

Alter almost never offers a castoff option on their figures, but Fate is an exception to the rule. She comes with a shawl – a pareo, I guess – that fits around her hips. She separates at the waist, right at the waistband of her swimsuit. It’s a very common castoff method but Alter thoughtfully provides an instruction sheet just in case anyone is unfamiliar with the procedure.

Although happiness doesn’t seem to fit Fate, it’s still a pleasing look. Perhaps it marginalizes some of the distinguishing – and attractive – aspects of Fate’s personality, but I suppose a sad frown and a bikini don’t mix all that well. Her pose complements her happy look as well; I’m not sure if she’s jumping or hovering but whatever she’s doing, she looks energetic and lively, with Bardiche in one hand. It’s a good thing she’s flashing Bardiche for everyone to see, since a cynic might note that that’s the only way you’d be able to tell for sure that this is Fate, with many of her characteristic qualities removed.

I really like the way Fate’s hair is sculpted, with her twintails splayed out and sinuous like tentacles. It enhances the effervescence and vibrance of her appearance and generates a bit of excitement that is otherwise hard to find in a swimsuit figure.

But not a lot of excitement and I have to admit, this is not the most dynamic or visually impressive Fate figure around, particularly compared to Alter’s barrier jacket Fate figures. Regardless, I do like this figure – principally because I like Fate, to be sure, and I am predisposed to like every Fate figure that exists, but I think it has a good deal of appeal on its own merits. Fate is quite cute, she seems happy, and her pose is interesting. It would’ve been nice if her bikini were a bit more alluring, but I suppose we can’t have everything. I think Fate fans will be happy to own this figure and non-Fate fans – or Fate fans who feel no compulsion to buy more than one or two figures of her – will be happy to skip this one, and thus everyone will be as happy as Fate is.

It’s curious that Alter released this figure of loli Fate, and then scheduled a swimsuit figure of Nanoha from StrikerS. One wonders if they’ll do a matching loli Nanoha or adult Fate; I’m guessing the latter is more likely. It’s going to be sort of strange having a swimsuit figure of nine year old Fate next to a swimsuit figure of nineteen year old Nanoha.

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When I shoot figures, I try to come up with an idea that will make them look interesting. My ideas often fail; sometimes they’re beyond my abilities to create, sometimes they don’t look as good I had hoped, and sometimes some unforeseen problem comes up that prevents me from getting the picture that I want. However, with Sasara, I mostly got the pictures that I had hoped to get which, frankly, surprised the hell out of me. They weren’t all exactly what I envisioned before I started but the general look and mood were close to what I was trying to achieve. Here’s how I made the first shot.

The Idea
I’m fond of church or temple-themed backdrops, particularly for armored fighting girls. A couple of years ago, I came up with an idea for a backdrop with a giant stained glass window, and I planned to use this for Daiki Kougyou’s gangsta lean Saber. Time passed and eventually I used a scaled-down version of the idea for the Saber Alter post. Needing a new idea for Daiki’s Saber, I thought that a church interior backlit by a large, ornate window would look cool. I waffled on constructing that set until I got a shipping notice for Sasara, and then I decided to appropriate that idea for the To Heart girl. At this rate, Saber is never going to get a review, but she sure does come in handy in inspiring ideas for other figures.

In my mind, I was thinking of something dramatic, with Sasara standing out from the background. I felt that controlling the lighting would be the most appropriate way to center the point of interest on Sasara, and I knew that I wanted a strong overhead light shining down on her. In the RPGs I’ve played, paladins have always had a strong association with light; one of my favorite spells in Everquest directed a beam of light from the sky to the target, like a divine spotlight, and in World of Warcraft, the word “light” is overused to an almost comical extent. But although it may be cliched, I wanted Sasara to evoke that archetypical knight-in-shining-armor look – even though she’s not really wearing much armor.

The Background

The set is constructed out of some wood sticks and panels that I had laying around. I think I bought these panels to construct a set for a different figure – I’m not sure which one it was, I’m guessing it was Daiki Kougyou’s Tsuneko – but I figured I might as well use them for Sasara. I had been shopping for adhesive window film for a different idea, and I came across this product on Amazon; the pattern didn’t work so well for that other idea, but I liked its centered-diamond motif, and I decided to base the window design off of it. Needing something to make the wall look less boring, I glued down some basswood sticks to mirror the pattern below the window to give a bit of symmetry, hopefully making it more interesting. Probably the most difficult thing about building this set was getting everything aligned, particularly with the diagonal cuts necessitated by the diamond shape. Better tools helped, though; I got a tool called the Easy Cutter from the local hobby shop and it makes cutting stripwood much, much easier than when I used a pocketknife or a handsaw. The window is covered with some very thin white foam sheeting to diffuse incoming light. The last thing I did was to cut some grooves in the wood panels to simulate bricks, but they don’t show up at all in the photos, and that’s just as well because I did a terrible job of it – all the grooves are wavy and crooked since I had a hard time controlling the Dremel.

The floor is just a cheap two foot-square panel of wood I got from Lowe’s covered with some Contact-brand shelf liner paper. I’ve used this same panel for Dizzy’s and Sigui’s reviews, and it works pretty well for sets like this one. Finally, there are a couple of big plaster pillars there, and I got those from an arts and crafts store for about ten bucks each. For that price, they look pretty good. I painted everything with a stone-textured spray paint, and though it looks better than it would have if I hadn’t used a textured paint, the grit is a bit coarser than I prefer.

Lighting

I didn’t think to take a picture of the setup, but it’s not necessary since the lighting is straightforward. The key light is a 580EX II flashgun at camera left, firing through a LumiQuest Softbox III. At about 72 square inches in area, the Softbox III is a small modifier by human standards but for small objects like figures, it generates very soft light. It’s positioned fairly close to Sasara for greater light falloff and to limit spill onto the background.

There’s also an overhead light, a YN-560 flash fitted with a homemade gridspot that is above Sasara and a bit to her left (that is, towards the right side of the frame). It’s firing at her hair, which is why it’s blown out. Finally, there’s a couple of flashes behind the window to ensure even coverage of light with no dark spots.

One other thing to note is that to get the blue color in the background – as the wall is obviously not painted blue – the white balance was set to a color temperature of 2900K. A light source at 2900K gives off a very orange light, so setting a white balance at that temperature imparts a blue cast to the image, cooling down that orange light and thus correcting its color. However, flashes and daylight light bulbs give off light at a color temperature of about 5200K, and setting a white balance of 2900K retains that blue color rather than correcting the color, like so:

So now I’ve got that blue background I want, but now I’ve also got a blue figure, which I don’t want. So what I did was place some CTO gels on the key light. A gel is just a colored sheet of plastic, and a Color Temperature Orange gel is, as one might imagine, colored orange. CTO gels come in varying opacity levels – typically 1/4, 1/2, and full strength; in this case, I stacked a full CTO and a 1/4 CTO together to get the color I wanted.

There we go – the CTO gels on the key light neutralize the white balance so that Sasara is colored more or less correctly while the background is still blue. I’ve got a flag on the Softbox III to cut down on spill on the background, but if you look at the pillar on the right side of the frame, you can see there’s just a bit of orange tint running up its side, and that’s because of some light spilling off that key light. It’s not a big deal – I could correct it in Lightroom or Photoshop later, but it doesn’t bother me.

Incidentally, if your camera does not have selectable color temperature in its white balance options, the tungsten setting is equivalent to around 3200K, and you can tweak that in Lightroom, Aperture, or Canon’s Digital Photo Professional. Also, I have no idea whether gels work well with desk lamps; I’ve used them with continuous light sources before (the first shot of my Fate Testarossa post was taken with a CTO gel taped onto a bluish LED work lamp with the zoom racked during exposure) but never with something as large as a desk lamp.

Post-processing
I always post-process my images. Every shot I put up here gets run through Photoshop at the minimum, and in recent months I’ve incorporated Lightroom into my workflow and as I learn more about its capabilities, it’s become more and more vital to the way I process pictures.

The first thing I do is import my images into Lightroom. The image above shows the way the picture looked upon import, with the basic settings Lightroom applies by default. In Lightroom, the first thing I like to do is tweak the exposure controls until it looks right to me. Lightroom gives you a ton of controls, and I usually like to increase exposure – since I tend to underexpose in-camera – and darken black levels. For this image, I also want to crop the picture. Since I switched my lighting system to flashguns, I prefer to compose in-camera since I don’t use a tripod very often anymore, but I obviously need to crop because the edge of the floor is clearly visible. I also want to take a little bit off of the top to give the picture a more balanced look.

Here is the picture after cropping. I think the composition works better without such a vertically-stretched feeling. I’ve also increased the blue saturation level a bit.

I decided I liked how increasing the blue saturation level looks, so I increase it even more, and I also boost up the red saturation level. I want to deepen the color of Sasara’s dress to contrast with the background. As the only red element in the picture, I’m hoping that it’ll be the first thing that the viewer looks at, and so I want it to stand out sharply.

The eyes of a figure – or a human – are extremely important and so for this picture, I’m going to spend a little more time on them. Using the adjustment brush tool, I’ve painted over the eyes – the red areas mark where I’ve painted – and I’m going to increase the color saturation of her eyes, like so:

On the left is the original file and on the right is the image as it has been processed up to this point. Not only are they brighter, their blue color is more pronounced.

I’m pretty happy with the image as it is now, but then I decided to see whether I wanted to add a vignette. This is something I’ve been experimenting with more frequency as I become more comfortable with Lightroom. A vignette directs attention to the center of the image and can increase drama, but there’s a real risk of overusing it or overdoing it or using it inappropriately.

In this case, I decided I liked the vignette – Sasara and the background are fighting each other for the viewer’s interest, and darkening the edges makes sure that Sasara remains the main focus of the image. In addition, I think it evokes a more intense mood that fits better with what I’m trying to achieve with this image. With the vignette, Sasara takes on more of that shining knight look that I want.

I then export the image as a TIFF file and load it into Photoshop for final tweaking. I have an action mapped to the F2 key to resize the image, create adjustment layers for levels, curves, color balance, brightness and contrast, and hue and saturation, and to sharpen the image, all in one keystroke. In this case, I don’t need to do much, and most of those adjustment layers went unchanged. I did increase the global color saturation to give the image a more eye-catching look; this was very unusual for me, because I typically don’t do this much saturation adjustment but I felt it improved the appeal of this particular image. Finally, I increase the red color balance in the highlights by +4 just to help Sasara’s skin tone a little. After that, I save the image as a PSD file for archiving and as a JPG for uploading to my website.

The Things That Didn’t Work
I’m satisfied with this image but there are a lot of things that didn’t work out as planned, or that I overlooked and don’t like. One of the effects I was really hoping to get was shafts of light radiating out from the window, and I lit a couple of sticks of incense to try to generate that look. Unfortunately, the light coming through the window is so soft that it just washes out the smoke, and I wasn’t enthusiastic about trying to increase the amount of smoke by lighting ten or twenty sticks. Maybe I’d have better luck with dry ice or a fog machine.

I also would have liked it if the background had a brick texture. Before I built the backdrop from wood panels, I had thought of using some hobby bricks to build the wall, as I did for Saber Alter’s set, but I was far too lazy to do that. I did try to cut in some grooves to simulate that texture, but it looked very bad, and it’s probably for the best that they aren’t visible in the images.

One detail that I should have noticed was the gap between the wall and the floor. I really wish I’d figured out a way to get rid of that; perhaps I could have used adhesive putty to fill it in or clamped the wall to the floor.

Final Notes
I should mention that this picture didn’t take me very long to shoot or process. I knew I wanted to give Sasara a more heroic and intimidating look, which meant shooting from a lower angle to give her greature stature. I wanted to give a greater sense of depth between Sasara and the background, which meant using a wider lens than the 100mm macro lens I usually use. I wanted a blue background which meant shooting on a tungsten white balance setting with the appropriate amount of CTO gels on the key light. I wanted the backdrop to have a sweeping, life-sized look – very difficult to do in my limited shooting space – so I left more room above Sasara’s head than I typically do. But I wasn’t really thinking about any of these things when I shot the picture – I’ve shot enough photos that I can make those decisions based on experience. That’s really the key to getting better at photography, I think; you can buy an expensive new camera or a lens with a red ring around it or a battery of Broncolor heads, but none of that is going to help you get better. The best way to improve is to shoot, look at your images to decide what you like and don’t like, shoot again, try out some new things, and shoot some more.

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