Toy Cars

Hot Wheels Chevrolet Camaro Convertible

It’s the end of spring and the start of summer.  It’s time to spiff up the car collection or in our case: the toy car collection.  These are cars, old and new, slowly dusted and brought back to life.  While not all these cars are Matchbox, that company still ranks number one in sales.  Matchbox brand was introduced by Lensey Productsin 1953 and later continued by Mattel, Inc. The brand was named ‘matchbox’ because its original toy packaging resembled match boxes because the original producer’s daughter could only bring toys that would fit in a matchbox to school. Mattel bought out the matchbox brand in 1997. Traditionally there are only 75 models in production at any one time. If they want to add a 76th model then one of the previous ones is discontinued and the number reallocated.

Riding in Purple

A great tip from Scott Kelby’s “The Digital Photography Book, Volume 3” (Amazon) is to use a tile of black granite as a background for product shots.  It works great!

These cars are a just a couple inches long on a 12″ tile and are lit by shooting the flash through an umbrella from the left.  There’s a little white card on the right to fill in the shadows.   When I took the pictures, they were exposed so you could see the granite but all those little flecks were distracting.  Pushing the exposure a couple stops darker in Lightroom and a little spot healing gives it that nice clean look.

Hot wheels setup
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The Hot Wheels cars are in the middle of a 12″ black marble tile. The tile gives that nice black reflection under the car but has to be pretty big so the edges don’t show. The 580 flash shoots through the white umbrella and a bit of white poster board gives fill from the back side. Of course, the Bengals are supervising.

Yellow Hot Wheels Ferrari

Be sure to keep everything spotlessly clean.  I went through a good dozen cars in an evening but there’s a few that look like a woolly mammoth had been riding on the hood.

Our Bengal Hiyu.