I'm finally done Invocation of Neheking my plog.
I spent three solid days trying to level up my photography skills, largely for the Golden Bat. Photography is the rate limiting factor: how good your models are doesn't matter if you can't take good pictures of them. Digital macro photography is the hobby I never wanted but have been forced to learn against my will. I built a light box out of scrap cardboard, duct tape, and some vellum I had lying around.
But I wasn't getting good pictures from it. So I did more research, and tried without the light box.
(Those are my fire eating torches on the left, if you were wondering.) The pictures were still too dark.
I did more research. Then I trial-and-errored my way through every relevant setting on my camera, writing down on a bit of scrap paper next to the model what each change I made was, so that when I was reviewing each photo, I would be able to tell what the settings were.
After all of this, here's a cliff notes version of what I've learned.
When photographing a model, you want your camera's ISO to be as low as possible (100) in order to have a greater depth of field, so that the entire model is (hopefully) in focus. You want to have an F/stop that is as high as possible (F9) to maximize the amount of light coming in. You want to be able to white balance your image, so that your colors look right, because colors appear different under different kinds of light.
I learned that my camera, a Canon Powershot ELPH115IS, will not let me manually white balance or control the F/stop. I learned that I needed whiskey. It (the camera, not the whiskey) can be set to white balance(ish) for different kinds of light (sunlight, fluorescent, incandescent), but light pollution will ruin everything, and you can't make it just white balance based on whatever's in front of it. Because I can't control the F/stop, I learned that I actually get better pictures when I set it on "auto" and jammed the camera up four or five inches away from the model. I'm shooting on a white background again now so that I can tell if my colors are being screwed up - a lot of the time, the white ended up skewed yellow or greenish-yellow.
I shoot 20 or so pictures of a given model, watching the F/stop (it tells me on the screen what it is, even though it won't let me change it) hoping the factors beyond my control will decide to give me the results I need, and I can get a couple of good pictures. In some respects, it's not unlike playing Warhammer.
But my pictures are, overall, definitely better. I don't like the white backgrounds, but they're necessary for the photography, so I'll need to learn to change them in photoshop.
When the new software for Carpe Noctem went up, it broke all the links in my plog. So I thought that, because I am stupid, as long as I was at it, I would re-photograph my entire army. This, as it turned out, took a really long time (something like 2 or 3 weeks). But it's finally done. Everything that was in here is back, with better photographs. There were a couple of cases where the old photos were actually better, so I kept them, but adjusted the light/dark levels in photoshop to make them clearer.
