- Hi, I'm Michael Gadlin.
- And I'm Kate Perdoni.
- Welcome back to Arts District on RMPBS.
- Ken Hendrix and Larry Patchett have been friends
for almost two decades.
They share a passion for photography,
old cars, and time travel.
A few years ago the Denver duo began experimenting
with forced perspective photography.
- This is when the image is not quite what the eye beholds.
They use tiny models, kinda like here
what I have in my hand, to simulate large scale scenes,
giving us a glimpse into the past,
while gaining international appreciation.
- Lewis Hine said
"Photographs never lie, but liars can photograph."
Photographs never lie, but ours do.
(laughing)
We like to think of ourselves as
pretty good liars sometimes.
- With integrity.
- With integrity, yes.
Forced perspective photography is basically shooting models
making them look full size and fooling the eye.
We're taking 24th scale models,
bringing them out into the world and
trying to make them look as real as possible.
1/24th scale model was .5" = 1' in the real world.
- Yeah, basically if you're a foot away from the model,
you need to be 24' away from the background.
- We shoot a wide angle lens,
which gives you greater inherent depth of field
and we also shoot a very small aperture, like F25, F29,
which gives you even more depth of field
so everything is in focus
from a foot in front of the camera to infinity,
which really helps sell the illusion.
A little over two years ago, we started doing
the forced perspective photography.
Larry said "Well, you've got a camera,
"and I've got some models, let's do this.",
and so, we went out and tried it,
and our first photos came out beautifully,
and we've been having so much fun ever since.
- [Larry] We're making very ephemeral dioramas
that don't last any longer than it takes us
to take a few shots and then it all goes
back into the boxes in there.
What really seems to set ours apart
is the quality of Colorado light.
- [Ken] We've gotten quite a few comments
on our photos of how beautiful the blue sky is.
- [Larry] And in a way, the secret to this is the props.
The first one we did was an ice wagon,
and I found little bitty blocks of ice
and made a set of ice tongs out of a paper clip.
Sack of potatoes, a case of Coca Cola
in the back of a pickup truck, cobblestone street.
- [Ken] Posters.
- Fake lamps.
Some milk bottles on top of it.
It's that additional touch that makes it time travel
and helps fool your eye.
- Every once in a while I'll take a few models
out in the back yard and shoot them
just to have a catalog of which models
we have available to us, and I thought it would be
a good idea to shoot a behind the scenes shot
of this to just kinda show people how simple it is
to get a really good shot of a model car.
So, I took a cell phone photo of the setup
and put it up on flickr and it went gangbusters.
The first weekend it was up it got maybe 85,000 views
and it's up to 105,000 views right now,
it's our most popular photo.
- Yeah, we spend all the trouble on beautiful sets
and beautiful models, expensive cameras,
and our most popular shot was done with a cell phone.
- People from all over the world are seeing our photos,
and that's really quite an honor.
When I bring my models,
I usually dust them off at home,
but Larry lets me dust off his models,
so I get out a little makeup brush
and dust off all the dust,
because the dust is actually full scale dust.
It doesn't look like 24th scale dust.
More full scale dust I can get off of these small cars,
the less Photoshop work I have to do.
- [Larry] You got it.
- I have spent hours kind of fixing dust on models.
We're time traveling, and we want people
to kind of travel back to that time with us
and remember what it used to be like
and we're using models from the 30s, 40s, and 50s,
and setting up in front of buildings
that were around at that time.
We try to make everything as authentic as possible.
When I was a kid we had a late 40s Studebaker Champion
that we rode around in and then we
upgraded to a '54 Chevy and thought we were living large.
- I grew up with Packards in the garage,
but they were already history by the time I was old enough
to know what I was looking at.
This car is a time machine.
Like, it doesn't say DeLorean, you won't find
a flux capacitor anywhere under the hood or the taillight,
but it's a way to travel through time,
which, in short, is what we do with the forced perspective.
We're able to go back in time to an era
that evokes nostalgia in the people looking at the pictures,
or just a sense of whimsy.
- [Ken] Some of these photos that we take
just bring back memories and the younger people
kinda get to see what it was like back in the day.
- This car has four ashtrays
and not a cup holder to be found.
So, just in subtle little ways like that,
the different way people viewed the world in the 1950s
than we see the world now,
and our time travel efforts help let us
highlight little bits and pieces of those worlds.
- That's hilarious.
We both love old cars and we both love photography
and when you can combine a passion with a creative outlet,
that's gold, and we're just having the most fun
that we've ever had.
- I can't improve on that.
- You can check out the entirety of one24thscale's
amazing photography collection at the link on your screen.
Wouldn't it be fun to experiment with that kind of
forced perspective photography?
I kinda wanna do that now.
- We an try it now, I mean,
we have two small perspective items here.
All we gotta do is have natural light
and be outside doing it.
This image received thousands of views in one day.
It's beautiful and looks so realistic.