Some More Beautiful Automatons

Monday, September 29, 2014
          Overcast, raining and back 
            to seasonal temperatures

Some More Beautiful Automatons

  I had originally hear from Mr. Igor Olho-Azul in the middle of June of this year. He had found my blog on the Net, and sent me an e-mail with a beautiful photo of an exceptional automaton.  I immediately wrote back to ask permission to post that exceptional automaton. Earlier last week, I received an other e-mail from Igor. He had more automatons coming to auction in the second week of October. I wrote back to ask how he was, and that of course, I would present these beautiful toys to everyone.

  Before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of the word "automaton". What an automaton is a mechanical toy that usually will also have music that plays a tune. The more-complex automatons have many movements and can play many tunes. The movement is usually created with a wind-up mechanism, and inside you might find a complex set of small chains and wiring that progress  as the energy of the wind-up releases. The chains have different lengths to allow for the different movements of the parts of the figure. I'm sure if you do a search or even visit YouTube, you will see what these beautiful and old toys can do.

Please click here to visit this fine Auction Company from Portugal

Normally, I  place all toys against a white background. Mt reasoning os that the toy does not have any distractions such as colour or other items in the photo, and thus the focus is solely on the toy. However, the photographer photographed the items beautifully, and I decided to present his fine photography, along with my usual "white background). The only thing that I did to the original Veritas photos is adjust the colour-balance.

You can see the excellent photography below. SOft living was used to record the toy with all of its detail. Also the darker background is called a "fade-out" in photography. A large rectangular shape called a "barn door"  is placed at the back of a softbox (a diffused light source) that causes the background to go into a gradual shadow.

Notice also, hope the photographer probably added a matte silver reflector to the right side of the figure's head to add extra bright reflections on the face of the man.These are called highlights.

What is so nice about this category of toy is how natural the figures are in terms of their poses, the fine detail to the hands, and feet, and the fingers and toes. Although these "toys" would most probably have been played with by adults and older children, Im sure younger children would be oat fascinated by the music and the movements of these figures.

Thanks for dropping by to visit,

and as always,

have a great part of the day or nigght, 

wherever you may be.

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com

please feel free to write to me anytime