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Hey everyone!

Usually I am on DakkaDakka complaining about the changes being made to my favorite games, or posting pictures of my recent painting commissions up from my business, Dark Pony Painting. However, I thought it best to give a bit of a tutorial on how to take good quality photographs using just the camera on your phone and a little bit of shopping.

Things you will need:

3 Reptile Lamps
3 Incandescent Light Bulbs
1 Roll of Wrapping paper (Plain white on the reverse side)
Sheets of Wax paper or Parchment paper for cooking
6 Cloths Pins.

Firstly, you are going to want a flat surface, like most wargamers know, the kitchen table tends to be perfect for this. You are going to want to lay out your roll of wrapping paper so that you have it flat on the table. Have a stack of large books or a large cardboard box in the back so that you can lift your wrapping paper up and then drape it back over the box, this will form that near 90 degree angle of white space that you need.

Next, after getting three reptile lamps and fitting them with Incandescent light bulbs, take a sheet of wax or parchment paper and put them over the end of each of them, securing them each to the lamp with two cloth pins, these will be your home made light diffusers! After doing this, have each of the lamps set up so that you have two facing each other, on each edge of the wrapping paper, and then another above the wrapping paper shining light down. This will give your model the appropriate lighting it needs without any shadows hiding on the details of your miniature.

Take a miniature, place it in the middle of the wrapping paper and turn on all three lamps while turning off all other light sources in the room, your result should look something like this...


(I used My little pony wrapping paper for mine...the friendship helps the miniatures)

Now that you have an appropriate set up for taking photos, now it is time to get your smart phone going.

You're going to want to download an image enhancing app, I use Photo Editor pro, this will give you the ability to color correct, change the brightness, saturation, contrast, sharpness, focus and much more. You will find that you will be adding about 10% of each of these to your photographs.

But before you do this, you are going to want to make sure that you have your camera's settings set to what your are taking pictures of. I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 with a good camera on it, so I tend to be able to take some nice photos. In your camera settings you are going to want to make sure that your White Balance is set to "Incandescent", seeing as it is the type of light that we are using. After that, depending on how well your lighting is set, you're going to want to enhance your exposure settings, believe it or not, most of the photographs that I take are set on 2.0+ Exposure, allowing more light into the camera lens.

The result of your photographs, after editing them through your app should look something to the effect of this...






Nice looking photos!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here, or like Dark Pony Painting on Facebook where we will be able to reply to you immediately! Happy wargaming and good take good photos!

www.facebook.com/darkponypainting

I appreciate the effort to make a guide for taking photos with a smart phone, as it's what I use and I hope to take better pictures with it.

I will say that I don't think those are particularly nice pictures (sorry!) and I usually have better results taking pictures in good daylight instead.

Yeah I have great success taking photos with my phone outside (not in direct sunlight).. However I like your idea of a super quick easy light-box type thing you have going on

 Bottle wrote:
I will say that I don't think those are particularly nice pictures (sorry!) and I usually have better results taking pictures in good daylight instead.

I don't get a lot of good daylight where I live, it is usually overcast and dark. However they aren't great pictures, I think nice fits given they aren't the usual too dark or strange contrast because of a flash. The miniatures are clear and granted some of it is due the size (width) of the image, how it is cropped as the examples are all small far view pictures. My phone takes in pictures in 2400x2400 pixels, so I can crop it and even at 800px have a real close clear image of the miniature.

Thanks for the comments back everyone! I do apologize for the small resolution of the photographs, that's due to me uploading them here and not adjusting the resolution accordingly.

Apart from that, I like having controlled light for the photographs that I take, for instance, in the winter here in Maine, I find it difficult to get a sunny day where it's not windy or covered in snow.


Here are some photos with the same lighting technique, with larger resolution and a backdrop.

 Avrik_Shasla wrote:
*snip*

I never use my iPhone to shoot anything remotely serious and I haven't really checked other phones, so I don't know what options you have for changing the settings. However, if you can I would recommend lowering your exposure a little as your images are washed out. If that's not an option on your phone I would simply get a point-and-shoot with manual options and some sort of macro setting.

Also, with your lighting setup images from phones will nearly always suffer from flare as the light sources hit your lens directly.