Tips For Your Pics – A How To Guide For Photographing Miniatures
October 15, 2015 by dracs
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Fab tutorial, mate. I really ought to mock up a lightbox soon. Not sure where I can find a tripod, but I’ll have a gander around some of the stores here for a cheap one. Top marks.
…no tripod – use a small beanbag!
I did pick up a small desk size tripod in the local poundstore so the beanbag might cost more 😉
There is another reason to zoom in, but also have the camera back some distance from the mini, and it all has to do with depth of field. If you have the camera up close, and zoom in from there, you will have a hard time getting the entire model all in focus (especially on models with lots of things protruding in all directions). Standing back further, zooming in, and keeping the model to the middle 50% of the frame, and then cropping at the end, makes it a lot easier to get a shot that is completely in focus.… Read more »
My flickr of Rackham figures gives an idea of the evolution of my photography, and I don’t have a light box (just halogen down lights in the kitchen, and a desk lamp with a paper “diffuser” in front of the bulb which points directly at the models).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/21265815@N07/albums/72157642462848653
Also auto focus is the devil. You want the camera in full manual. A tripod with a remote for firing it is great.
This is good stuff, there was some short while back a series run of inputs on the thread,
“How to photograph miniatures”
in the hobby thread that had some goodly and sage like advice from members who are also established photographers worth looking into. James Evans’s help and advice is to be quite honest really well written. Nothing wrong with above but thought I would just say in the history of the Hobby page there is a vast amount to compliment this neat coverage here.
Chris G
a nice article I would sit and pick faults on the paintwork if I saw a good picture of my models.
Nice post, cheers really should get a proper rig setup for taking pics of my work, quick photos with the phone cam is only good for so much. If you want a dedicated image processing software nearly as good as Photoshop then the free own source the gimp software package is very good. Allows you to adjust all the hue, saturation, apply filters and the like plus all the bsic cropping work and then adding layers so you can change backdrops etc, there site can be found here http://www.gimp.org/
I will have a play in the coming weeks, but from work I have the Corel equivalent, and if you have a sony camera, you can get for free Capture One, which is sufficient for post processing.
Cool, I got spoilt at art and design college with Photoshop which costs the earth if your anything other than a student…
Paintshop pro ftw ! (or im to lazy to learn anything else, been using it since the 90’s)
PSP is awesome!
I plan on just using my wife. She can finally get some use out of that arts degree.
Wooo! Awesome tutorial man! Good to finally see you on the front page! Also where it the thumbs up button for the article, you deserve major props man, it was an awesome piece of work 😀
Thanks @caladors and I need to give thanks to Sam for editing it all together. Hope it helps the community.
Looks like the people found their thumbs up button 😀
great tutorial – simple and easy to understand, great for beginners!