Saturday, June 4, 2011

Painty painty paint paint

Insert typical "wow it's been a while since I've posted" opening.

It's now June and the next big thing coming up for me, hobby-wise, is the Quake City Rumble Indy GT. This will be my first GT style tournament and I've set what I feel are reasonable goals for myself.

Have fun.
Try to avoid stupid tactical mistakes.
Don't get annoyed at bad rolls. (What? Me? Pout at bad dice luck? Never!)
Have my army fully painted.

That last one is the reason I haven't posted in a while. I've been spending all my available hobby time painting to make sure I'm done in time.

I've also got to make a display board, which will be a first time thing for me. People put a lot of effort and creativity into display boards, but I'm trying not to get too far ahead of myself. First, finish painting the army well. Then, make an acceptable display board with whatever time I have left. At a bare minimum I should have a flat board based like my models mounted to a breakfast tray, a la Rushputin. (Kinda cool how you're the first google search result for 'warp stone pile, eh?) If I finish painting in enough time I might try to throw some scenery on there to bump my painting score up another point.

So all this points in an obvious content direction for this blog, I need to take some photos. We have a pretty good digital camera with macro settings, but I have no backdrop / light box to speak of. Anyone have good recommendations for how to put together a decent model photo setup without spending an arm and a leg?

1 comment:

  1. I ended up getting a lightbox off of eBay for ~$30 a little bit ago. It's not perfect, but it's still pretty amazing.

    If that's more than you want to bother with, I used an Amazon box with printer paper in the back for years.

    Things to remember:
    - A neutral background, preferrably without creases
    - Don't use a flash.
    - Do use a lot of light. Yellow light sucks, and will need to be mitigated
    - Do stabilize your camera on something. I've got a baby tripod for nothing off of eBay years ago. When I'm not using it, I'm resting the camera on a book or CD case.
    - Experiment with a number of camera settings to see what produces the best pictures. Don't trust the point-and-click, figure it out setup. Definitely remember to turn on macro.
    - Take several of every picture; keep the best looking one.
    - Run the final pictures through Picasa -> I'm Feeling Lucky.

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