Can't Photograph Miniatures For Toffees (2)

Went back to the problem and kicked it around a bit more. After quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I established something that seems to work.

These are a couple of simple conversions from Warlord 28mm infantry. I'm sure you can see the problem! The shine is annoying, given that in "real life" the finish shines like rough concrete...

So, I tried something else. With the camera in closeup mode, on a tripod set about 40-50cm from the work, I positioned the figures in front of a window, to get daylight as the main light source. The backdrop was a simple piece of kraft paper, and a piece of green card for the "floor".

I used a halogen lamp, place on one side as fill-in illumination, but left the overhead room lights off. I then took the pictures, using averaged metering, both with and without flash.

Post-exposure, all the pictures got a little bit of processing via PhotoShop. I used autolevels on all of the pictures, and in some cases on the non flash shots, it appeared necessary to reduce the red level via the Colour Balance function.

Flash has a habit of burning out closer parts of the shot - the colour disappears from the edges of the subjects. Also, any highlighting (and most of the shading!) is lost. Finally, the flash pushes some pictures to a very blue colour balance that I didn't think was very helpful.

The end result is this. The same two figures, photographed as above. The house, incidentally, was made as per the "Building Simple ECW Houses" instructions in an earlier post.

Not perfect, but I'm happier with it.