Photography

Miniature Photography

Posted on June 25, 2010

I’ve got about 7 photos to show here, so I’m going to put it behind a cut to pretend to save peoples bandwidths.

The topic for today is “playing with miniature photography”. As I mentioned, I went to my dads and his camera is a lot nicer than mine, so we got some interesting photos. My dad decided to take a bunch of photos in a row, with some different settings, so we’ll take a look at some of those photos and see about what difference those settings do.

First thing: some lighting. The first photo has two side lights and a flash, and the second photo has only the two side lights. The difference is pretty obvious. I think that most of my photos would be dramatically improved by more lighting – I think even the flash and two side lights isn’t enough. I feel like I want to get like…6 really strong lights and just flood the area with light so there can be no shadows.

In the mean time – flash is good.

Next is three fascinating photos. These three photos made me think about physics, and really made me want to pull out a measuring tape and a piece of paper and pencil. Most people would just keep playing with settings until they had it right.

These were all taken with an aperture setting of f/5.6. My camera ranges between 2.6 and 8. My dad’s camera ranged between 1 and 91. A larger number here means that the iris of the camera is smaller, which has a few outcomes:

The amount of light let into the lens is smaller. Which means you need to decrease the shutter speed to allow more time for enough light to make the photo look correct.
The focal depth of the photo is really small.

It’s #2 that’s really interesting. In each photo you can see that a different part of the model was set in focus, and that anything that is even a few millimeters away from that point is blurry. The second photo is my favourite example of this. The third one is so close to being a perfect photo, but not quite.

The reason I had a thought to pull out a pencil and paper, is that all of this can be calculated out in advance. The size of the iris has a direct relationship to the forward and aft distance from the focal point. The lens has a distance that it is best to focus at. Armed with Wikipedia and some camera theory, I’ll bet you could make these photos perfect.

Now, the next question is: why not just raise your aperture setting to the roof? That would mean you would get the entire model in the photo, and you wouldn’t have to do math or geometer or anything like that (math is awesome). The reason is in the next three photos!

I’m purposefully not showing the entire model here, because the model isn’t the point. These photos were taken with successively larger aperture settings. f/11, f/20 and finally f/36. The camera goes higher – I believe the manual claimed the largest setting was f/91.

You can see in each photo that the clarity of the background increases. This is bad! Model photography you want the background to be a clear blur, so that the model isn’t lost in a sea of background crap.

Something else interesting, if you look closely at Temple Guard 3 you can see the corner of the whitebox and the tags at the back and all that crap. Those were taken at f/8, and the background is clearer than in the lowest of the photos below. Which means that there has to be more to it than just f-stops. But I don’t know what it is.