DISCUSSION: photography

Horus Heresy: Imperial Fists praetor

I've wanted to improve the quality of my photographs for this website for a while now. I'm not yet in the market for a new camera. I know which one I'd go for if I had the funds, but as yet it is a little out of my budget. As such, I wanted a way to improve the pictures I take with my current setup. At present I use my Apple iPhone 5S to take all of the pictures for this website. Until now, most have been taken simply by holding the phone and aiming it at the subject. But, thanks to Tale of Painters, things are starting to change...

A month or so ago, Garfy at Tale of Painters posted a series of tutorials on miniature photography. If you haven't been to the Tale of Painters website before, stop whatever you're doing (including reading this if you must) and go there now. Their site is similar to this one but... well... so much better. They have better painters and the luxury of a team of people to make sure they can post high quality daily updates. That's something I'm always going to struggle to keep up with here (but then I am the only contributor).

Anyway... Back to those tutorials... Among several posts on more professional methods, Garfy made a post about using smartphones. You can read it here if you're interested. It's an excellent article and one I've attempted to follow to the letter. The praetor model above was photographed using that advice. Normally when I photograph my models I have to bring them into Photoshop, cut them out, crop them and add a new background to them. It takes a while to manipulate each image. The image above has been cropped, but that's it.

Warhammer: dwarf runesmith

I've featured this dwarf runesmith in an earlier post. It was something I painted last year. Unfortunately when I made that post, I noticed that the picture was a little blurry. This one is of the same model using the technique in Garfy's article. Again, I've done no additional work to it other than to crop it and export it at a better size.

Admittedly I've still had to spend some money, but less than £20 has got me a tripod, a holder for my phone and a new camera app for my phone (all three of which are mentioned in Garfy's article). It's considerably less than the many hundreds a new camera would cost and is more than adequate for now. The quality improvement, however, is notable. In future, I'll likely start using this method for photographing small, individual models. It might mean my familiar blue/white fade backgrounds become less and less common, but it's the miniature we're interested in seeing.