How to capture a Dragon Egg

Creating epic photos of a Game of Thrones Dragon Egg – Watch on YouTube

We love creating practical effects for our photography, getting everything in camera is much more satisfying than using photoshop. With that in mind, we wanted to show you how to make your images more dramatic and epic looking using some lighting and smoke, with no photoshop needed! in this tutorial, we’re creating epic photos of a Game of Thrones Dragon Egg from the Noble Collection.

Game of Thrones Dragon Egg

As we all know, Dragons are real and pose a serious health risk for adventurers as well as photographers. However, the dragon egg we have is only a replica, so we should be safe. This one is a replica Game of Thrones Dragon Egg from The Noble Collection, who are renowned for making some of the most accurate and high quality mass market film and movie replicas out there.

This egg in particular has red and brown colours, with some yellow highlights towards the bottom. This makes it perfect for some fiery yellow, red and orange lighting. We’re going to start from the basics and work up to an epic shot!

Composition and setup

The composition is quite simple for these shots. We placed the camera on a tripod and the dragon egg on a table. We’re shooting on a Sony A7III with a Tokina 100mm f2.8 macro lens. The lens is able to focus further away, so moving the camera back and forth allows us to change the framing. We’re shooting landscape to allow some room for smoke later.

The starting shot is very plain and boring looking, but we’re going to quickly make some improvements by adding various photographic elements. Let’s start with a backdrop and shooting surface to make the scene look dark and moody.

Ambient Light & Lighting

Lighting is what makes this shot epic. We’re going to add Red and Amber lighting arms from the Adaptalux Studio to illuminate the side of the egg. There is also a second red lighting arm in a Pod Mini behind the scene, providing rim lighting on the right side. This light behind the egg will also shine through the smoke and pick out the subtle wisps for the camera to see.

We also added a shade. The ambient light in our studio was hitting the egg and shining along the top. While this could be a nice addition to the egg alone, when combined with the smoke, white light will create a greyish haze and severely detract from the red and orange smoke effect we want.

To be safe, you should try and control the light in your scene as much as possible. You can always add more white light back in later to illuminate the egg in the places you want. We added extra white light in some shots to bring out the detail of the surface of the dragon egg, but it still interferes with the smoke.

Dragon Egg Smoke Effects

The smoke is where the magic happens. We used a smoke machine to create our smoke, but you could use a micro fogger, atmosphere aerosol spray, or a vape to create a similar effect. In fact, our smoke machine was overkill and creates so much smoke that we had to bottle it and release it slowly into our scene.

There is a lot of trial and error involved from here on out. The wisps of the smoke are unpredictable and can be affected by your own movements. It’s best to place the smoke as carefully as you can and in the places you want it, while shooting away when it looks right.

We took hundreds of shots to get a handful of final images where the smoke looked good, but you might get lucky and have the smoke go right where you want it! For more tips on smoke photography, check out our smoke photography tutorial!

This Game of Thrones Dragon Egg from the Noble collection is an ideal subject for creating some epic shots, however without control over our lighting, it does not look quite the same!

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