The Little World

One of my friends has commented that the world now seems to be full of people who are determined to be offended by something. I think he may be right, though it might always have been this way – we just never had the access to social media that brought it to our attention.

What to do, what to do…?

The reason this topic pops up in The Little World is I have just been scolded by a couple of people on a Facebook forum for posting images of toys that have offended them. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there we are.

The forum deals with model cars – the die-cast ones that are made in China in various scales. I collect them in 1:18 scale as well as in smaller sizes , and use them for photographic props in my Little Studio. There are people all over the world who do the same and they send images of their collections and their dioramas through the Die-cast Collectors Forum – some of their pictures are brilliantly done. You can genuinely not tell the difference between the tabletop image and the real thing.

Mine aren’t as good, but I do like to include real people in the scenes. They might be Hot Rod Honeys or advertising images or fake family snapshots…but I try to make them as realistic as possible. Recently the theme of ” French Car Weekend ” suggested to me that I could use a series of shots taken with a French dancer and a small 1:18 scale Norev model of a Citroen 2CV. The story I told was of a trip to the beach and a cranky car that wouldn’t start.

The errors I seem to have made was to have the lady at the beach in a bikini – that drew ire from someone who is apparently an administrator – and to tell the story in sequence with several shots over three days. That got a complaint from someone else and the  admonishment to keep my pictures of single ones in the future.

I’m deriving a good deal of amusement from this – the bikini complaint is from someone in Australia… and the other seems to be from elsewhere. In any case I’ll carry on as cheerfully as before – putting in the occasional bare picture of a new toy car and reserving my larger productions for this blog. And I’ll contact the people who seemed to like the dioramas and productions and suggest they start reading this column – they’ll be more than welcome.

If they can figure out how to send them, I should be pleased to feature some of their pictures as well – some of them really are sensational.

Note; Our heading image is Mlle. St Tropez en vacance. She’s better looking than M. Hulot…