In the Web-era, dominated by the global connectivity and the social networks, it does not matter what is your hobby: no doubt, you will found a lot of Forums on Internet dedicated to your passion, where to be informed about any news, to share comments and photos with other fans and have a look at tons of collections (as yours!) around the world! Among the many Forums devoted to statues, statuemarvels.com is one of the most famous and appreciated by all collectors, especially those interested on Marvel characters (and, actually, with a special consideration for Bowen Design). Of course, as a regular client of the Italian Forum, my partecipation to StatueMarvels was quite limited; nevertheless, there I met many virtual and passionate friends and I had the opportunity to admire many awesome art-works of Blindzider, a collector from Atlanta, who masterfully put together his love for statues and his professional capabilities as a photographer. I love making photos of the pieces of my collection and creating suggestive images by using some elementary photomontage techniques: I think it is an excellent way to have fun and give space to fantasy! Nonetheless, it is not so easy to get a good result. You need not only a fine photo of your statue and some evocative background: you have to know how to choose the right angle of the subject, the depth of field to eventually blur any subject around, to position the light properly, to control the overall brightness of the environment, to adopt a suitable background image, able to emphasize the character or his main features. In other words, you need talent, creativity, passion... And if this is not clear enough, just take a look at Blindzider's works! Most of his images are really amazing and perfectly mix the above mentioned qualities. For this reason, I thought it was a very good idea to invite my American friend here and to show to all fans (and especially those who have not yet had the opportunity to admire his works) some of his best shots and his boundless creativity. Have a look at the gallery, click on each image and... get ready for your "WoW"!

Hello! I am based in the United States and started reading Comics in about 1985, primarily Marvel, which were always an escape as well as a way to feed my imagination. This continued through the ups and downs of the comic industry until 2015 when I stopped buying monthly comics, permanently switching over to only buying hardcovers. My favorite characters were always Spider-Man and the X-Men, primarily the team from the initial John Byrne run, and over time Captain America became a favorite as well.

My first Bowen Statue was the Red Daredevil Museum statue which I purchased around 1998/99. This led to a couple of X-Men, and of course Spider-Man. For various reasons, I stopped buying statues for a number of years, then came back in full force, obtaining all of my favorite characters, then Spider-Man's villains, and even branching out into the Fantastic Four and Avengers, ending with what I consider the core of the Marvel Universe. Full-size statues were always the preference, but there are times when I like the wider breadth of characters available in bust form.

While I have always been interested in photography, it never became serious until about 2013. After spending many hours in the online forum statuemarvels.com and seeing other collectors take beautiful pictures of their collection, I decided to start learning about photography myself. After a short class, a bunch of reading, and asking people questions, I began posting basic pictures of my statues. Eventually this led to building backgrounds/dioramas to create "scenes" for the statues, always attempting to recreate a frame from a comic book or make it look like the statue was "real". Finally, I moved to digital compositing, which was much easier and less time consuming than building set pieces. Over the years I've tried to improve my techniques in my photography as well as photo editing to make "art pieces" featuring various statues. The ideas for the art pieces come from either the comics themselves, direct recreations of covers or panels, or just from 30 years of looking at comic book art. Some inspiration also comes from even more years of watching and studying films, recognizing camera angles, composition...

My first "real" camera was a Nikon D3100, which was an entry level DSLR and I primarily used the kit lens that came with it. I was also using Google Picassa to do photo organization and minor photo editing. In about 2016 I upgraded to a Nikon D7200 as well as started using Adobe Lightroom for photo editing. When I started doing composition and adding "special effects" I used the open source software called gimp, primarily because it was free, but hope to move to Photoshop at some point.

Many of my photos are available for purchase here: blindzider-photography.pixels.com
You can also follow me on social media: Facebook and Twitter.