How to make better pictures of your models?

Introduction

Painting alone is challenging and sometimes daunting task, but brings lot of fun, especially if your work is appraised well. To share all this hard work across the internet it is common for lot of painters to publish pictures of their painted beauties. Unfortunately taking a good picture is a challenge on it’s own rights and while it’s easy to take decent picture, it can be quite frustrating to take perfect one.

I’m playing with non-miniature photography for quite a while, so I thought it might be helpful to share some of my insight from this area. While internet is spammed with photographic tutorials, they are rarely focused on taking pictures of small objects. Also macro photography is not something you would like to use to present your models.

I have found some tutorials discussing specifically miniatures and while they provide very good info, for me they lack complete visual explanation how different settings work. This is something I tried to address here. Nevertheless I placed some very good links and references on the bottom of this tutorial, so make sure to check them as well!

Good picture vs. Good post-processing

There is an argument if one really needs good picture taking skills these days, when everything can be edited and pimped in post processing software like photoshop. Well, it depends…

If you are photoshop expert you can use camera that would store pictures in RAW format and have vast possibilities to correct bad lighting, white balance etc. on your computer (without losing quality). It would not be that much easier and faster than taking good photo though…

Even if you are no expert, slightly blurred images can be sharpened, bad white balance somehow tinted, contrast can be enhanced. One thing to understand though is that it will always produce a bit lower quality than just taking good photo in the first place.

Good photo can be just enough to publish as it is (after only slight changes). Post-processing is always some sort of compensation of badly taken picture (unless you want some extraordinary/artistic effect).

Basic information

First of all, let me guide you through appropriate equipment. It does not need to be pricey. Basically you would need:

• Good light source
• Shadeless tent or similar construction
• Tripod
• Background picture or flat colour sheet
• Camera
• Optionally – cable to connect your camera to PC

You can have this set-up for reasonable price, much less than if you would decide to go without tripod or tent.

Here you can take a glimpse on how my photo workspace usually look like:

Light source

Good light set-up is essential for taking any pictures. In general it will cause your photos to have better overall quality. It’s because photography is all about capturing light after all. If object is lit well, photographer have a lot more flexibility to choose other parameters of the exposition. It can also help if you like to use lesser quality camera. That’s basically why in full sunlight even smart phones can produce nice pics, despite very poor lens.

You should maximize effect of light(s) used on purpose and minimize influence of other, accidental lights. It simply means that you want your lighting to be predictable (colour and brightness) and at the same time avoid model being lit by for example TV screen, monitor or even bright leds of dormant electronic devices.

In my case – I’m taking pictures on evening when external lighting is minimal. My source of light is a quite strong single bulb producing daylight-like light. It was bought in electronic market for small money. You don’t need professional lightning when taking pictures of miniatures. It’s easy to lit them with simple stuff, just look after having appropriate color temperature close to real daylight (ask for 6500K).

Shadeless tent

While people usually understand why they need camera or light source it’s quite hard to explain the reason of having shadeless tent. What it is after all? Simply speaking – some tent/construction to put the mini in. Light comes from the outside and through semi-translucent tent walls. By avoiding direct lighting and passing it through diffusing material we get less shadows and much better overall, ambient lighting.

Take a look on pic taken with good light source, but without shadeless tent:

It’s OK to an extend, but lot of detail is lost due to directly cast shadows (e.g. on cloak or bottom part of the weapon). While some models will be OK with such lightning, many of them would loose too much. Also picture background could look less natural.

Having the same pic with shadeless tent:

As you can see, diffusing light alone would make your picture look much, much better!

There is an argument how to light-up your tent, so just to quickly summarize your options:

• Without tent – strong shadows, lost details – do not use this option
• Tent lit from the inside – outrageous idea The whole point is for light to go through diffusing material – don’t bother for that one as well.
• Tent lit with one light source from above – small shadows still present, good details. I prefer that one, because it’s easy to set-up and having small shadows make more natural look (for me).
• Tent lit with multiple light sources – from above and from the sides. Basically this is how one “should” use the tent. This is not my preferred route though. It produce best detail lighting, but lack of any shadow looks weird and a bit flat for me.

Last, but not least – tents are usually really cheap. If you would find expensive one – don’t buy it After all, It’s just a piece of semi-translucent cloth on the frame. DYI if needed!

Tripod

For me it is a must-have. You can buy cheap one, as it will not be that strained by taking pictures in static environment. If you believe that you can hold your camera still enough, than you are wrong

Simply – if camera is not perfectly still, you would need to use shorter shutter time (in less time your hand would move less, so less blur on the picture). Just by having shorter exposition time you let less light in the camera and picture would be too dark. It means that you would need to use smaller aperture number (bigger hole to let light in) or better camera lens (not to lose too much light in the process). Also your cheap bulb may just not be enough to provide good lighting for short shutter time.

Believe me – it’s usually much cheaper to buy simple tripod than having to invest in professional lighting or better camera lens.

Background

It is quite simple – as you can see on picture of my workbench, it’s just a piece of paper placed behind the scene. It’s good for it to be matte, but shadeless tent is helping to avoid reflections even if some level of glossiness is there. Since it’s hard to make quality prints of this size at home, I’m usually using simple sky/nature posters cut to the shape. You can get plentiful of them in a market for pennies.

Having colourful and printed background you need less picture post-processing. This is a separate topic itself, but in general it’s much harder to get purely white or black background on the final picture.

Camera

I will make this deliberately short – you do not need DSLR camera to make good pictures of your minis. Good compact would be great as well. I would not suggest to make pictures with your smart phone, as you can hit lightning problems and it will usually overcompensate using very high ISO (more about this later on).

If you are buying your device now, let me give you one advice – building effective lens is definitely harder and more pricey than better image sensor. Of course marketing would not tell you that Always choose lens quality over image sensor quality. Good lens would let more light in without much distortion. Good image sensor is just electronics and all it can do is to compensate bad lens. Especially praising megapixel value is usually just marketing.

To have some comparison – my set-up is good old Nikon D5000 + Tamron lens (50-250mm zoom). It is perfect, but way too pricey if used just for miniatures pics. I would never buy it for this purpose alone.

It would be perfect if your camera would allow to manually set following parameters (rest of this tutorial will focus on using them):

• White balance
• Exposure compensation
• ISO
• Aperture

Connection to PC

This is not essential to make quality pictures, but it would make it much easier to meddle with exposition parameters. My Nikon is able to be connected to PC through USB cable and be steered by appropriate software. Without touching the camera you can make shots, change parameters and choose the perfect combination easily.

I’m using freeware application http://digicamcontrol.com/ and it works perfectly for my Nikon D5000. I have no idea about other cameras though. If you have similar possibility – use it.

Default camera mode

Most often I’m using aperture mode in my camera, meaning that it allows to set aperture manually. It should be available these days in most of semi-manual cameras. Usually it is referred as “Mode A”. Reason for using this is that aperture is very important in case of miniatures, as it allows to control depth of field (explained later on).

I’m not using auto mode at all and I strongly suggest you to avoid this as well. In auto mode you can not really know what type of aperture-ISO-shutter balance your camera would choose, which can lead to unpredictable results and frustration

White balance

First setting I would describe is so called White Balance. It affects not only whites, but whole colour range. It is a way that camera tries to compensate lighting conditions (brain does the same for us while being in the same condition, but on pictures it is portrayed as it exactly is).

Imagine that you take a picture of a person in a white t-shirt. In the clear sunlight, light reflected from this shirt to the camera would be close to white. On sunset – it would be bit orangey. Under fluorescent light – it would be colder and bluish. In the woods, light reflected back from the foliage would tint everything with slight green. We do not see that, as brain does the trick and compensate it for us. Camera is just physical toy and don’t have such super powers

Without WB your picture would be tinted by lightning conditions. Most cameras provide auto mode for WB and it can work well if you have lot of different colours on your models. It will not work well if there is a domination of one colour though, so for example taking pictures of bunch of Dark Angels can be challenging if using automation.

Best solution is to use manual/probed WB setting. It works in a way that you take a picture of grey or white sheet under lightning conditions you would than use for pictures. So just put this blank page inside your tent and follow your camera instruction. Camera would than compensate exactly what’s needed.

Here you can see pictures taken with different WB settings under the same lightning conditions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exposure compensation

Putting simply – exposure is telling about amount of light getting into camera. We can let in more or less by changing aperture and/or shutter time.

When using Mode A, we set aperture explicitly and shutter time would be derived automatically by the camera. Unfortunately this automation is meant to be universal and usually it’s better suited for scenic shots or portraits than colourful and contrast minis.

By using exposure compensation setting we can suggest automation to make picture a bit darker or lighter. Usually I use +0.3 or +0.7 setting in my case, but it depends on many factors, so you would need to play with your camera and see what does the trick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISO

Simply speaking ISO is sensitivity of image sensor in your digital camera. It was used as well in old cameras, but sensitivity of film was rather lower and fixed by chemical properties. In digital cameras we can set ISO on our own. Some modes would automate ISO setting, but you should avoid them.

If your aperture is fixed, having high ISO set would mean that shutter speed can be higher (less light would make the picture appropriately bright). While this is positive, there is always some cost – this time it would be quality drop.

High ISO setting would introduce visible grain (picture noise). On old cameras grain was usually seen as interesting effect, but on digital ones it’s rather awful. Despite camera type – while taking pictures of miniatures you would like to minimize grain, hence try to use as low ISO as possible.

This is why tripod is very useful – you can get sharp picture with longer shutter time, so your ISO can be lower and grain is minimized.

 

Aperture

Last, but not least – aperture, that was mentioned throughout the whole tutorial It is a hole/opening in the lens. Aperture setting governs how much light is physically let in the lens interiors. Simply by that it influence picture brightness, but this is not the cause why it’s that important for minis.

The other trait of aperture is to set depth of field (DOF). If one have large DOF it means that far and close objects would be sharp. If DOF is small – there is only small range of distance from the lens (centred in the focus point), where objects will be sharp. In this case all objects closer and more far would be blurred and out of focus.

DOF is useful tool to put more life in your pictures. In case of dioramas it can help to build up realistic feeling of depth. In case of single minis it needs to be set appropriately, so the whole mini and details will be in focus.

Aperture is usually shown in numbers like f/2.8, f/8.0 etc. Higher number means small aperture, so small hole to let light in. It can bring you problems with taking picture without the tripod (long shutter time needed or high ISO causing bad grain), but also provides largest DOF. Small number means easy photo shooting, but provides shallow DOF.

Knowing all those traits it become more obvious why tripod, good light and tent are so useful. They are not essential per se, but would make your life so much easier having more choices.

Here you go with some examples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Effects of zoom in the nutshell

More than often I hear some myths told by people about how cameras and lens works. It is partially because they base their opinion on only few exposition conditions (taking vacation photos in bright sunlight and auto mode is not necessarily in depth experience). The other thing I blame is unfair marketing talking any bulls* to sell more cameras

All what I’m about to say is about “optical zoom”, not “digital zoom”. The first is real and done in lens, the second is marketing bulls*.

So one of these myths is opinion that when using “zoom in” you would get lower picture quality than using “zoom out”. For minis it would mean being far vs. close to the mini with your camera.

First of all – we have two types of lens. Fixed focal length (primes) and ranged focal length (zooms). Primes are much easier to build, hence for comparable amount of money they will provide far better qualities than zoom lens. On the other hand they are rather inflexible and suited well for repetitive tasks only.

The most important thing to understand is that if you are using zoom lens it largely does not matter if you are “zooming in” or “zooming out”, because damage was done – on the whole range they are usually of lower quality than primes. In fact – focal length and aperture can affect lens qualities in very weird and non-linear manner. They are web pages showing in detail how specific setting affects picture quality.

Having said all this – you should not care. Really. For miniature picture taking it usually does not matter. If you still care though, my only advice would be to test it on your own, as any hint I can give would be applicable for my lens only.

Other trait of zoom lens is to affect DOF. Large focal length (more zoom in) would tend to emphasize DOF. Technically it does not change, but in practice large focal length would blur out of focus areas more, bringing more visible effect.

Sample shots with different focal length using my set-up:

 

Other sources

Best tutorial I have found (check both parts). No misleading errors, which is rare: http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.fr/2013/09/miniature-photography.html

Quite informative and factual guide on picture taking: http://www.wampforum.com/VB4/content.php?r=419-Photography-the-Basics

Quite nice tutorial with lot of good insight. I’m not fully bought to all on concepts (macro!), but definitely worth reading: http://nesbetminiatures.blogspot.fr/2011/03/tutorial-miniature-photography-part-2.html

For reference – art of making photos with phone: http://www.themossop.com/2012/03/how-to-take-great-pictures-of-your.html

 

 

I hope you enjoyed my quite lengthy tutorial and in case of weird problems it would be easier for you to overcome them. Please feel free to put comments below, I would be happy to answer your specific questions.

 

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