Today I have a little insight into the making of acorn elves. Everybody thinks how hard it is to glue an acorn elf together, that it takes a lot of time and so on. But it’s quite different. It takes about 15 minutes to glue your own acorn elf (well, I can do it in half that time).
Here is my video tutorial, where I create an accorn elf within 9 minutes.
As I said, creating and acorn elfs is easy, everything else is much more challenging, but let’s look at it chronologically and take this fresh photo as an example:
Sunday afternoon in the forest: we build tents with our daughter Anička and then we take pictures of them, we are not very good at it, the tents are falling apart, but we still made something (about 2 hours of walking, building and taking pictures).
Sunday at night: it occurs to me that I could glue some of the tents together at home and then just photograph them in the woods with the acorn elves, the result will definitely be much better.
Sunday 22:00: Im gluing the acorn elf camper.
Sunday 22:10: acorn elf is glued, I start the tent, it will need a platform – I go to the garden under the oaks to collect some branches.
Sunday 22:50: the platform is glued together, I’m going to make a skeleton with thinner twigs, on which I’ll stretch some tarpaulin. So off to the garden again in search of thinner material.
Sunday 23:10: skeleton glued together. What to put as a sail? Leaves? That wouldn’t last long, so I try birch bark from my stash.
Sunday 23:40: the bark is hard to work with, as it has more layers, the glue doesn’t stick to it very well and peels off, but eventually the tent is finished. The camper still needs a fireplace – we wanted to make one in the woods with Anna, but we couldn’t find any stones. Fortunately, there are enough of them in the garden around the pergola, so I take a torch and go out in the dark to look for suitable stones.
Monday 0:20: the fireplace made of stones and the cauldron ready. I’m still enjoying myself, finishing my wine and cleaning up.
Monday 0:40: cleaned up, going to bed.
Monday 8:00: I take the youngest to the next village on my bike to babysit, on the way back I cross the forest and look for suitable locations for photos. Usually I do this stage when I go for a run, but today it would be over 10 km – there are old oak leaves everywhere, I can’t find a pure coniferous forest without leaves. Finally I find two usable locations.
Monday 10:00: I pack the acorn elves, camera, reflective board, first aid for the acorn elves (glue gum and fusible cordless gun), tripod and set off on my bike to the chosen spot. Where I unpack it all and take pictures.
Monday 11:30: mosquito bites again, I carefully store everything and go home with a hundred pictures, hopefully some of them will be usable. As it turns out later, there are far fewer usable images than I expected – halfway through the shoot I’ve readjusted the aperture, so the rest of the photos have a very shallow depth of field. Well, I didn’t notice again yesterday that my ISO was set to 16000. It’s a good thing I don’t shoot for a living :)
Monday 12:30pm: I picked a few photos and am editing them in Photoshop – it requires retouching the glue, adjusting colors, highlights, shadows, filters, sharpening, exporting.
Monday 13:20: I’m writing this post
Monday 6:23pm: I’m sharing the photo and this story on facebook, twitter, google+, instagram.
Check out the final picture again – can you see the approximately 8 hours of work (10 minutes of which was gluing the acorn elf)?
It sounds awful like that, but I enjoyed every one of those hours (except for the mosquitoes). And I took more of those shots too, not just this one, I had a couple of older glued together acorn elves from the advent wreath that were also great for camping, so I took them into the woods to air them out a bit.
My whole point of this post was to outline that the acorn elves gluing is only a fraction of the work behind the photo.