A Survivor by Jesse Feyereisen

Words and Photos by Jesse Feyereisen - A Platypod Pro
Edited by Eryka Bagwell

During a recent shoot, I felt compelled to combine my affinity for both Toy Photography and Astrophotography… Here is how I curated the final capture.

"I recently found this Alien Xenomorph 3D print file online, and immediately had a photo idea of it floating in space. Without hesitation, I made the purchase, printed, and subsequently painted the figure. Then, it dawned on me, I have some photos of the Sun that I took with my a telescope some years back. 'I should just use one of those!' To top it off, I found some photos I took from the Mercury transit in 2016. This is where the planet Mercury crossed in front of the Sun, and I knew I had to use one of those. Also, I combined an old (failed) shot of the Antares constellation as my star field background. I thought it might be interesting to put all those shots together, mostly just to say I did!"

"The Alien shot itself was fairly basic. I staged the model by mounting it on my tabletop using some 'helping hands.' I placed a flash (gelled orange) in a large softbox (behind it) to give me a nice, slightly overexposed light source that I would replace with the Sun capture in post. I pulled in an additional flash and a bounce card in front of the Alien for a bit of fill. As I mentioned before the Sun was shot in 2016 with a camera connected to a Celestron Edge HD 8” telescope with a solar filter, sat on an AVX mount."