Photo Critique

[CreganTur]

I've got a Sunpak eBox for my light tent which comes with 2 50W Halogen lamps. I just recently bought a Sony e230 DSLR with a macro lens for taking picutres. My camera settings are:
iso 100
F18
white balance Daylight
Quality Vivid

I place the lamps along the side of the light tent and adjust them to about a 45 degree angle to get a good, even wash of light across the front of the miniature. My tripod, that came with the eBox, is really tall so I've put some boxes under the backdrop to raise the mini so it's only slightly lower than the camera, which means it's about even with the lamps. I use a 2 second timer when taking my pictures so the camera can settle after i depress the button.

For my first round of photos of my pirate goblin dio I got these photos:

For the second round I adjusted the lamps so the light was spread a little differently. I also pulled back the camera some so that the figures were closer to the center. I got the attached set of snaps.

View attachment 5217

These are much better, and they're unbelievably better than what my old Kodak easy shot could do, but they're still not a high enough quality to match how the mini actually looks in real life. I'm wondering if part of the problem could be the light tent itself- it swallows the mini because it's big, so I'm wondering if the lights jut get too diffuse and the camera's not picking it up as crisply as I'd like. Any other ideas of what I can do to get better pics?

 

[Noddwyr]

I would say try betting your lights a little higher. But I think the real problem is that your lights arent bright enough, or white enough. Try getting stronger lights. Also i would lower the f stop just a bit.

 

[BPI]

Hi Cregan, I'm not too keen on the blue cloth you're using as a backdrop, it's just a little too strongly coloured. In this particular instance I think it's distracting from the blue trousers that both characters are wearing. A switch to something more neutral, or paler would be worth playing with I reckon. Not that I've much room to talk having used the same ever-mankier square of grey felt for over a year now

Cheers, B.

 

[Dragonsreach]

Cregan;
I've had a look at the pics in Photoshop with the intent of trying to Tweek them.
I'm seeing couple of things which aren't helping.
Overall you are shooting the pictures from above which is limiting your depth of field of focus due to the angle.
Also there is a lack of contrast evident in the pictures and also, I'm sorry to have to point out, in the painting.

If you can get your camera so that the centre of the lens is a close to parallel to the centre of the miniature as possible then you should be able to get a greater crispness to the pics with the depth of field.
Also try to find a large grey background (back in the day of 35mm metering we used 18% grey as an average) and try to allow to to curve away behind the miniature so that it goes Out of Focus that will help concentrate attention on to the painted figure.

 

[CreganTur]

After taking in everyone's suggestions on my photography skills, chaning my background, adjusting the height of the mini in relation to my camera, and the light tent setup I think I finally have some good pics of this piece. It is much, much closer to how the piece looks in real life. Thanks for everyone's help!

New CMON voting link

 

[CreganTur]

I had a friend come over today and show me what I was doing wrong as a photographer. After about an hour we had worked out all of the major problems that were causing my pics to suck. The biggest problem was, as I thought, the light was being diffused way too much because my light tent is rather large. To fix that, we pulled the mini into the middle of the tent and folded in the sides so they are much closer to the mini. Second, I was using the wrong whitebalance setting. We changed it to Tungsten and that made a huge difference (he explained to me that Tungsten was yellowis light, and my halogens were on the yellow end of the spectrum). He also showed me how to properly use photoshop to tweak the final settings.

I took all of his advice and used it to snap the series below. What do you guys think- is it good enough?