Wyrd Summer Painting Contest – Setting up the photo

All of the models posted recently were painted for a diorama for the Wyrd Summer Painting Contest! Building a diorama is as much about framing and composition as it is about technical painting and modeling skill. In my case, it’s also a little bit about photography!

I wanted to set up a scene such that the 3 models would be in sharp focus, but that the house in the background would be softer. This means adjusting my cameras aperture, as that controls the depth of field. For these test shots, I decided to angle the camera such that it was perpendicular to the line created by the Gunsmith and Killjoy, which put the Fire Gamin a little further towards the camera.

I took a number of different photos, but because these are all test shots I set the ISO to 256,000, which means I can get in focus shots without needing to pull out all of my lights. I moved the aperture setting up and down to see where I got the best results, I tested where to have the camera physically to get the photo I wanted.

The shutter speed isn’t important in either the test photos, or the final shot, because it’s only job is to ensure that I don’t get blurry photos, and that I get the amount of brightness I want out of the final photo. Basically, I adjust the shutter up or down to ensure brightness after I’ve decided on the aperture I want.

You can see one such photo here. At f/2.8, Killjoy is nicely in focus (as he’s the focus target), but the Gamin is blurry!

I swapped out for a bigger piece of hardboard and pulled the models further away from the house so I would have more “focus space” to work with. I set the aperture to f/4 but couldn’t get what I wanted still. Lastly, I set the camera to manual focus and then I finally got the photo I wanted.

I assume that the auto focus was focusing somewhere just behind Killjoy, which put the Gamin to far out of field to be in focus. This photo I manually focused somewhere on between the Gamin and Killjoy, allowing them both to be in focus.

Again, because these are test photos it’s perfectly fine that the gunsmith is to dark, shadows are all over the place and that the image is really grainy. We’re just trying to set up the framing!

Now, it’s important for me to remember that when I’m done I’ll be taking a few different photos from different angles, but I wanted to have one where I had put the work into getting exactly the photo I wanted, before I started building anything!