The British Photographic Assignment 2020: COVID-19, Entry “Plastic Planet”

Entry by Photographer Ian Wade

Plastic Planet

Ever since the beginning of Lockdown in Great Britain which started on the 23rd of March 2020, my photographic world and photography opportunities dramatically shrunk. Being confined to my house and garden at first and then my local surrounding areas as restrictions have been eased my approach to photographing nature has been turned on its head.

One morning, I was playing with my two and half year daughter Maya. The game she loves at the moment is playing with miniature plastic animals. As we were playing with these toys I had thought, why not photograph these animals as if I was photographing real-life subjects. So there was my challenge, take these toy animals and put an environment which would be as close as possible to real-life during the lockdown. 

My first challenge finding the right locations for these plastic animals. Next was to capture the toys with my camera to make them look as natural a possible even tho they are plastic toys. I watched lots of clips and documentaries of nature history and researched pictures online to give me a sense of where these animals lived and some of their behaviours.

After all this, I was excited about heading out and capturing the pictures, along the way I got many strange looks from people. Especially when I was photographing the toy tiger in a local stream.  To capture this image I had to lie on my stomach in the stream to achieve the correct point of view. At one point  I looked up to see a whole family staying down from the bank with a look of confusion! Another embassy situation was photographing the tiny urban fox at night in my street. I’m sure some of my neighbours had thought his guys is cracking up!

I wanted to capture these plastic toys during the day and night to ensure they looked as natural as possible. I chose to my macro lens for all the different shots to my the set as fluid as possible.

It’s really interesting to see how your photography changes when a situation out of control governors how you can take your pictures.

The new British Photographic Assignments, open to all British-based photographers and those of British nationality the world over is continuing to accept images until 1^st of January 2021.