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

A Little More Brushwork. . .

A little more brushwork on the first batch of (my version of) the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment yesterday (Saturday). Taking a different tack this time and addressing many of the details first before the white coats and other larger areas of uniform. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that I've painted the (dark) red stocks of the enlisted men. Always a difficult and frustrating item to paint, it made sense to paint from the inside out as it were and get that particular detail out of the way first rather than try to paint it in later after much other painting has been accomplished. Trying to reduce the need for later retouching of other items on the figures you understand. Hopefully, I will be able to get back to these later today after a second trip back to the Apple Store for help with a couple of new iPad issues and, following the return home, some revision of Google Slides for tomorrow's meetings with my students. -- Stokes P.S. And according t...

Basic Reds Done at Last. . .

S till quite a way to go with the current batch of 20 human figures and a horse (of course), but they're actually starting to look like something after all of the red distinctions. Quite a bit of painting in hour-long sessions the last week as and when time has allowed. Mostly applying the basic dark red to facing areas and turnbacks followed by the inevitable touch-ups to clean up wobbly edges and those misplaced, minute splotches of Citadel Khorne Red. They're looking like so many Austrian infantry regiments of the era at this point, but the eventual flags will turn them magically into the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment, more or less, of the AWI period. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. One frustrating point (ahem) of sad discovery. I've started trying to use those Winsor & Newton 'Series Seven' brushes (#1 rounds) purchased last spring, and the blasted things simply will not keep a point. Very frustrating since I have heard over the y...

It's Early Days Yet. . .

M aking some early progress with Batch A of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment over the last several days/evenings. Nothing terribly exciting just yet, but the basic black, brown, and flesh areas are done as are the green bases, and gray undercoat. The latter two areas needed some careful retouching early in the week. Next up, the neck stocks. I might just do these in red for the enlisted men although some of my source material suggest they were black, but I always look for an excuse to shake things up a bit. Any errant splotches of red (or black) can be covered with another application of light gray before I move onto the next step. "Giddy up!" as one Cosmo Kramer might have said. -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

Search This Blog