Experiments with Camera & Light Tent. . .

Two photographs of Eureka Miniatures' "Oh, you're so awful!" vignette, painted by yours truly in June 2018.

After a busy Saturday putting finishing touches on some hobby-related projects (not actual painting or gaming I fear), and whipping up a batch of delicious spaghetti meat sauce in the late afternoon, I retreated back down here to Zum Stollenkeller Mk. II for a couple of hours to play with a camera and my light tent kit. You might recall that the latter was purchased via Amazon after Christmas and the New Year last January, courtesy of an online giftcard from my parents.

Took about a dozen or so photos of the above vignette, two of which seemed good enough for some minor editing (basically just clicking on 'Auto Levels') and cropping in Pixlr online. Not quite Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, or Edward Dmytryk quality as far as deep focus (depth of field) is concerned, but we're getting there.

A useful trick seems to be backing off the zoom a bit, which keeps more items within the frame in sharper focus rather than the tiny camera brain zeroing in on a single point. The lady in the peach dress and her larger table are sharpest if you look very closely, but the items and figures around her aren't too fuzzy. Of the two, the lower photograph seems best.

My tendency has always been either to zoom in too much with the lens, or get the actual camera too close to the subject in an effort to fill the frame. Frustratingly, that almost always throws off the focus with modern cameras and devices that "think" for themselves. I believe that Henry Hyde discusses just this point somewhere in his chapter on photography within The Wargaming Compendium.

Instead, you can fill the frame by cropping your photograph(s) in post-production using a photo editor like Photoshop Elements or similar. Currently, I use Pixlr online, which does the few things I need plus a whole lot more if you have the inclination and patience to figure it all out (I don't). But focus is the main thing to, ahem, focus on when taking pictures of your figures and/or tabletop set-up.

Anyway, these two shots seem to be a move in the right direction. Now, I just need to figure out the larger Sony camera body and lenses that were passed on to me last spring when ol' Mom upgraded her photography gear.

-- Stokes

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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