Sunday, August 06, 2006

Miniature Photography

Jim asked in a comment how I photograph my miniatures.

There's no secrets to it, just a lot of trial and error which, when I use a digital camera, is painless (ie, cheap) because I can dicard my failures without a qualm.

Furthermore, my partner is an illustrator, so I have access to her PC which has Adobe Photoshop installed. Photoshop is great for "fixing up" my mistakes because you can use it to adjust the lighting, brightness, contrast, image sizing and cropping of the image. As such it can make my fairly ordinary photographic skills look better than they would with a "film" camera.

Most of my camera work is done in the evening in our kitchen with every single light turned on. This is why you may sometimes see a high contrast between the subject of the photo and the back-ground. The room is relatively dark and the flash is doing the hardest part of the job by illuminating the subject of the photo.

The bast single tip I can offer is to ask you to take your miniatures outside and photograph them in natural light. If your camera takes a reasonably high-resolution image, then do not bother to use your zoom function. You can display the image at it's actual size on the monitor and then crop all the extraneous bits anyway.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Greg.

I'll keep trying. If I get some good shots, I pass them on for your review.

Jim

Bloggerator said...

Honestly, If you've good natural light, you can't go far wrong. If you've a digital camera, taking multiple shots of the one subject (and discarding the duds) will yield some decent images. I'd love to see what you (or anyone reviewing this blog) might come up with. I'll put any shot up you might care to email to me at bloggerator@gmail.com

Cheers,

Greg