Photography Update!

I’ve been steadily changing and upgrading my photography setup whenever I can. There are some inexpensive things you can change, and some expensive things you can change. Here’s a few things I’ve changed since my last update.

 

Getting Rid of the Soft Box

The soft box is great, but it’s limiting. I wanted to be able to take photos of more models and it wasn’t big enough to take a picture of more than 1-3 models, and almost certainly not a unit without getting cramped.

I kind of hacked together a diffuser for each lamp. I bought some white cotton, a knitting hoop and some bendable metal rods. I put the cotton inside the hoop, and used the rods to place this directly in front of each lamp. In this way, the lamps are now much more portable.

This was an inexpensive fix, but it required some ingenuity.

 

Making Use of the Space

Now that my lamps are portable, I had a bit more space, but not by much. I had printed out a gradient image on a piece of 8.5×11 paper, so my photos are still limited to whatever can fit on this paper.

So next, I had printed out a gradient on a 3 foot square. This is huge and unwieldy, but now I can fit an entire army on the paper. Now to determine what I can’t fit on this…

 

This piece cost me about $70 to get printed. It’s made of a strange paper material that isn’t cardboard, but is still thicker than most other paper I’ve felt.

 

And then…

Then I bought a new camera. >.>

It’s a Lumix GX7, one of the best of the latest round of mirrorless cameras. It has a ton of features I could write about, but you can look it up if you care.

Something about this latest round of photos has a feeling to them that I can’t explain. I have to blame the camera.

(I bought it for a lot of reasons, not just miniature photography :))

Walking around.

It’s one thing to take photos in my own apartment, with all my stuff. It’s quite another to go to a convention and try to take photos of beautiful models folks have.

My favourite lens, the Panasonic/Leica 25mm, has a terrible focus distance. Even though it’s a tighter lens than most, I can’t get closer than about a metre to the object before it can’t focus anymore. So even though the photo is beautiful, the model is tiny inside it!

My normal lens I use for models is the Olympus 30mm macro with a 4/3->m4/3 adapter. This is miserable for walking around because it takes about 2 seconds to focus – longer than I have time for in a lot of cases. I could manually focus, but it also has a minimum aperture of f/3.5, so indoors or at night I’d have to push up my ISO to get reasonably bright photos (without a tripod, since I’m walking). At that point, noise is introduced and we’re back to not great.

At AdeptiCon, I only used my 14mm f/2.5 m4/3 lens. It’s a wide angle, but the focus distance is quite nice for models and it’s bright enough to take photos all day. In a perfect world I’d have preferred something with a longer focal length so I could get tighter photos, but the fact that the lens is only about an inch long is the final reason why this lens is great for this use – the camera fits in a pocket (or my leather satchel :)).

 

The only significant downside, is that you really have to watch your depth of field. At f/2.5, the depth is pretty small. Ok for a model, not ok for an army. I saw a photographer walking around AdeptiCon with an external flash, and I’m thinking about that now. Add a bit more light, and you can push up the aperture more and still get nice bright photos!