A simple little guide for taking relatively good quality photos of your minis with minimal effort and resources. This isn’t a guide for photography experts, it’s for anyone and everyone using only things you already have in your home (eat your heart out Blue Peter). Things you will need:
- A few sheets of plain paper
- Your model painting lamp
- A moderately decent phone or digital camera
- A computer
Why?
Why bother to take photos? Well, we all live online these days and sharing photos with your friends (and/or followers?) is a great little source of micro-endorphins, and the desire for those is a great motivator to get models finished. Personally I’m not on Instagram or whatever, so I just share photos with my friends on WhatsApp.
Model backdrop
First thing to set up it your backdrop. I use a few sheets of plain white printer paper (multiple sheets because one sheet is a little too transparent). Plain black paper is often better, depending on the colours of the model, but white is what I have so it’s what I use.
The goal here is to put a gentle curve into the paper, so there is no nasty seam between the floor and the back wall. You can prop this up pretty much however you like, I use some little work pegs, but you could use BluTack or just wedge it in place with something small but heavy. Sometimes the weight of the model alone will do.
Lighting
All the light. As much as possible. I generally do this during the day with the curtains open and the room light on, but despite all that you’ll also need something more powerful and direct. Your painting lamp should suffice, but it depends a little on what you use. I have a lovely big plank of light, with a diffuser built in.
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| Daylight and room lights |
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| Daylight and room lights and painting lamp |
The goal here is no harsh shadows, so if you’ve got something like a naked bulb that is going to be a point source of light that leaves big hard shadows, you’ll need to find a way to diffuse that, maybe some thin paper or tissue paper (but remember kids, don’t wrap a hot light in flammable tissue paper, be sensible and don’t cause house fires).
The closer you get the camera to the centre of the light the better, so any shadows that are cast are not visible to the camera. I don’t have a picture of this, since I didn’t think to get someone else to help out and photograph me taking photos. In my case I rest the camera just below the centre of the light.
Photography
Hold the camera steady, make sure it’s in focus, and take a photo. Don’t know what else to tell you, this isn’t an expert’s guide. If in doubt take a few and pick the best later.
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| The photo, dull and uncropped. |
Editing
Whaaat? Editing? That sounds like hard work! Isn’t that cheating? I mean… depends what you do I guess? I don’t think so, neither hard nor cheating. All I’m doing here is making some adjustments to the lighting that a better photographer with a fancy camera would probably have done up front.
So, you could go nuts and pay for Photoshop, it’s genuinely the best photo editing software I’ve ever used, but it’s also expensive and I don’t use it enough to justify it. I use the free alternative GIMP. You may now laugh. Whatever you use, the basic principles will be the same, but I’ll be explaining the controls specifically for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”. Jump over to their website and give it a download.
Boot the GIMP (hur hur) and open up your chosen photo. First up we’re just going to crop the image. For the sake of consistency I general leave a gap of the thickness of the base in the photo, that generally feels not too tight but not wasting space. Sometimes I will leave extra white space on one side of a particularly unbalanced model.
Next up we get more technical, we are going to play with the Levels.
Method one is to use the pickers, use the white picker to select the darkest bit of white you want to appear as full white, and the black picker to pick the lightest bit of black you want to appear as black. This will update the, er, I don’t know, the spread of brightness maybe? Everything beyond those points will become pure white and pure black respectively.
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| See the green dot for where I placed the white picker and the yellow for the black picker. The difference between this and the previous image should be clear. |
Method two is slightly more tricky, you manually tweak the input levels. The graph shows you how much of the image is that brightness, obviously the white background takes up a huge chunk of the picture. By moving these arrows you change the black point, the white point and the mid point (this last one tweaks the overall brightness of everything in between).
Of course there are way more tools to play with, this is really just a starter, so as you play with it more you’ll find your own preferred method of getting the photos looking as you want them.
Once you’re happy, save the file. If you use “Save” or “Save As” it’ll try to save a GIMP “.xcf” file, so you’ll want Export As to get a nice shareable “.png” file.
Finished
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| Final results |
And there you have it. It’s not amazing, it’s not going to win any awards, but it’s a serviceable photo that is going to look a million times better than a picture of your hand in front of a messy paint station to enable both praise and feedback, and only takes a few minutes (well, probably on the first time, but once you’ve got used to it and especially if you start batching them up).
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