Photographing your models and showing them off on Dakka can be a very rewarding part of the hobby. It can provide you with useful tips and feed back as well as the much needed support to finish a project.
However photographing little toy figures is not the easiest this in the world to do.
In this article i will try and give some backing pointers that will help you get the most out of your equipment and models.
Equipment
Camera:
This does not need to be expensive as the final out put will be for the web so the MP (megapixel) count is not that important. I would say however that web cams are not great to use.
Lighting:
The cheapest form of lighting is the sun. Try to shoot on cloudy over cast days as this will give a flat even light to you models. Bright sunny days will give too much contrast.
If you want to shoot indoors, try to use a daylight bulb rather than a tungsten etc as these can give nasty colour casts (i will talk later about how to correct those)
Background:
The best back grounds for minis is a simple white one. This will enhance your models, be less distracting and help with the cameras focus.
I find the best was to do this on the cheap is with simple white paper or card curved so it has no harsh edges.
Here is a pic to show you what i mean. You can see that my studio is just a big version of that.
Cropping
I see a lot of pics on Dakka where the camera is either too close and the image is out of focus or too far away and no detail can be seen.
I don't use macro lens when shooting models as the depth of field( amount in focus) is very small.
The simplest way to do it just to crop in from a larger file. Remember these are only for the web so the files can be quite small.
This is how i took the shot straight from the camera.
This is with a quick crop.
Colour management
This is a huge subject and far more complex than many of you will ever need to know about, but it can have a huge impact on how good you models look online. As it will affect the colour of your models therefore how people see the pallet you have chosen.
The simple ways to get this right "in camera" are:
- Have you WB (white balance) set to the type of light you are shooting in. Eg cloudy or daylight for out side.
- Have a simple white background so your camera is not confused (however a light grey will be just as good) Plain and simple is best!
After you have taken you photos run them through and editing software on your computer, I use photoshop but anything will do. This will let you crop the image and adjust the colours.
Sometimes your camera will get it wrong and it will need a "tweak" this few seconds with the colour setting and change the whole feel of your photo.
eg:
The wrong WB setting on the camera
Corrected.
Another big thing for the web is the images colour space. For the web you should save all your files as SRGB rather than for printing needing RGB.
In windows if you use the save for web feature this should apply SRGB as standard. Again this will help show the right colours.
Conclusion
I will add more detail to this over time as im asked more questions, so please ask away so i can tailor this to peoples needs.
Frazer
