Plus-Plus Blocks

My son made a bunch of war minions with his Plus-Plus blocks. I thought they looked cool so I wanted to create a cool picture.

Here's the setup:

My goal was to make a battlefield look so I went with 2/3 "land" and 1/3 "sky" composition. I also purposely used the right edge to show in the picture so it's a little more interesting. The countertop is a dark maroon marbled look so it was good to use as a platform.

From the left, I have a reflector to bounce back some light from the flash. I also placed some white pieces of paper to help lift some shadows. I didn't use an umbrella because I wanted the extra dramatic effect. I placed a dark blanket with some Christmas balls to mimic stars. Those are lit from the second flash on the chair.

For the smoke, I used matches and boy was that hard to time right since I didn't have any help.

So here's my setup for this shot. This was taken with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. The main flash (YN560 III) was set to 1/64+0.7 at 24mm. The background flash (YN560) was set to 1/128 at 24mm.

This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

I did a lot of editing like split toning to make it feel more like if they would be battling on Mars.

50mm 1/125s F/3.3 ISO 200