Bright eyes and posing tips?

In daylight or bright lights the reason why the eyes go dark is because when the light hits the skin, it causes the aperture of the camera to close. The eyes are inset and small, so it causes them to apear really dark. What you need is soft even lighting no 'hot spots' typical of sunlight, direct light, and flashes close up. In the shade I noticed quite often the background it bright, this will also cause the doll in the shade to darken also. If you can override settings on the camera, you can compensate for that. I really don't have any tips on posing, other than where possible avoid bright backgrounds if the subject is in the shade. In a case like that, you can use the flash to light up the subject in front.

 

It's possibly because they're acrylic eyes. Acrylic eyes are harder to get to light up than soft glass or glass eyes. It sucks because in person they're SO pretty! ;~; You can also try a bounce light by sticking a piece of white paper in his lap on close ups.

For posing, you might want to try sueding him. When I had my DOD oh so long ago, I found that while they posed nice initially by the time I got back to take a picture their limbs had slipped into awkward doll positions. :S

 

Ahh, the pains of backgrounds. When I was in film school, I always had that problem...random things such as leaves in the shot that I didn't want.

I think my main problem was that I was focusing solely on the subject itself and not really looking at what else was getting in the way. So what I do now is, set up the pose and then look at the background itself, double checking that there isn't anything I don't want in the shot. Then I take a practice shot and look at it through the camera...double check again for anything weird in the shot. It's alot of slow down and just observe closely. It takes up time; but it's worth it in the end.

I can't really help you with the eye thing because I have the same problem. I think what Batchix said is right though...it depends on the eyes just as much as the lighting.

 

Sometimes you need to light the eyes. Forward face lighting buy bouncing light with a light board. Even try using a flash light aimed at the eyes.