Action Figure Photography S2:E2: shootingthegalaxy - Matthew Cohen

Posted by Bret on 06/12/18 at 12:45 PM Category: Action Figure Photography

Previous "episodes" can be found HERE.

Matthew Cohen can be found on Instagram as shootingthegalaxy. He allowed us to share his photography and a bit about himself here.

Hey guys! My name is Matthew Cohen, or you might know me on Instagram and Flickr as ShootingtheGalaxy. I'm from New York and have been a toy photographer for about 2 and a half - almost 3 - years now.

I grew up on Star Wars through the VHS tapes in the mid-90's, and by the time I saw them in theaters as The Special Editions, I was already a fan for life, beginning my collection with a jacked POTF2 Jedi Luke that my mom bought me instead of a Vader by accident (They both wore black; Mom's right?).

I stopped collecting around '06 / '07 after receiving the last figures I'd get until 2015 as a Christmas gift from my friend's family who knew I was big into Star Wars. A Jedi Luke from the rancor pit, ROTJ Lando in Han’s clothes, and an Imperial Officer from (I believe) The Legacy Collection. I just kind of grew out of it, I guess. I'd always check out what was on the shelves and what was new when I was someplace that had toys, though.

I sold my collection around 2014 to fund newer, just as expensive hobbies.

Then in 2015 my fiancée bought me my first Black Series 6-inch figure (of which I was vaguely familiar with), a First Order Stormtrooper, on a whim after I told her how much I loved the new trooper design. To my surprise and disappointment, its articulation was kind of terrible. (I thought these were supposed to be high-end, super-articulated figures?) But that still sparked my interest in collecting again. A week later I bought a Kanan figure from Rebels at a comic shop after getting hooked on the show. That figure showed me what these higher end figures could do and be. It's still one of my favorites. Everything kind of snowballed from there, picking up new figures every now and then.

It wasn’t until I got into the Japanese import figures I’d been hearing about, a little while later, that I found my love for toy photography. The level of detail, articulation, and expressiveness just begged to be played with. I’d recreate scenes from the films on my kitchen table and ended up having the idea to take terrible pictures of them with my cell phone camera. Around this time, I started to discover there was a whole community of people taking amazing photos with their Star Wars toys (and others) and it immediately drew me in. I dusted off an old Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot I had laying around, stuck it on a cheap plastic tripod my fiancée had, and started trying to shoot more seriously for the first time in my life.

Things just evolved from there. I taught myself through YouTube and other photographers' work, picked up my first entry-level DSLR I’m still using, and just started investing in diorama bits and pieces, photography software like lightroom and photoshop, and of course, MORE toys. For a year or two straight I was probably taking new pictures every single day, just practicing to get to a point where I could say I really liked my own photography. Even now I’m sometimes hesitant to call myself a photographer or an artist when I look at some of my peers' work. But it’s been a fun journey. And although I branch out from Star Wars every now and then, nothing pulls me back in the way it does.