I understand what supervike is saying, photography can seem like a lot of effort but you will get clearer images from an SLR than a phone and if you can set it up it is worth doing.
Photography is such a wide subject to cover and not easy to do it quickly. However, these days it's so easy as every time you press the button you can instantly see the results on your camera or phone, if it's on a camera and you're using on manual it's actually really easy to sort, if the image is too dark, make it lighter, if it's too light, make it darker, it's on dial to control that and easier than you think.
In all honesty for just posting online images phones are incredible these days. They do it all for you and maybe an SLR isn't needed. However I would rather stick to my SLR as I have more control and that's why I use it.
What I will say for SLR's is everything you need to do it completely formulaic and once you have it right you won't need to change anything much for the rest of your mini photographs for the future. You will get larger and clearer images too but that might also take a little processing, I've been into photography almost as long as I've painted mini's and am used to it as I learned it at school and have carried that knowledge forward, however if you're coming into it blind it can seem daunting. I'll try and explain everything you need to do which takes way longer to read than it will to do, it's actually really easy.
Get your mini set up on a nice big bit of paper or card curving up to the wall and taped in place so it doesn't move. Then the lights you use for painting, one or two, get them to light the mini how you want it to be shown, if they are too intense use some tracing paper or grease proof paper or something translucent to diffuse the the light that's hitting your mini. Don't have it touching the light, just near it so it doesn't burn !
So... Onto the camera, get this in place on a tripod. If you don't have a tripod put a cushion or bean bag on a chair and use the self timer to take the shot. So now you're shot is set up and ready to take, (some lenses have a build in stabilisation to help you take better hand held pictures without wobble, once the camera is on the tripod this needs to be switched off or the camera will try and compensate for movements as it won't know it's on a tripod).
Why are camera's so scary ? Admittedly camera's do have a lot of settings but once you've done it the first few times you might want to tweak settings a little to get it right and then so long as you keep the camera in roughly the same place with the same lights it will just be a case of putting the settings in the same as you had before and pressing the button, easy
Part of the reason camera's often struggle is the white balance is set incorrectly. White balance is as the name suggests how the camera reads white. You should have settings within the white balance menu for out door bright sunny days, out door dull cloudy days, indoor and fluorescent lighting. There might also be a Kelvin setting where you can set it manually, Kelvin is how light is measured, average daylight is around 5500k, but if you're shooting indoors depending on the light sourced used it can be around the 3000k mark. Anyway I'm over complicating this and it can be corrected on the computer if required later. However if you can get it right in camera that's better. These days camera white balance is good so you should be able to use the Auto setting but it's always nice to understand how to fine tune that.
Then if you can use the camera in manual mode it will have 3 main settings: ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture.
ISO is a photographic standard for film speed, you can set this between 100 and 400 and get perfect results for shooting mini's. It's essentially how quick the camera's sensor can read light and therefore how quick it can record the image.
Shutter Speed is exactly as the name suggests how long the shutter stays open and exposes the camera's sensor to capture the image. As we are shooting a still subject this can be as long as you need so long as the camera doesn't move.
Aperture controls depth of field which allows the background to blur out. Personally as we are shooting mini's I would keep it around f14 or there abouts. If you set it on f2.8 or something really low you might find parts of the mini become out of focus.
Now you understand what each of those 3 do all you have to do is balance them to get your shot. Personally I'd set the ISO as low as you can, 100 if possible, my Nikon doesn't go below 200, it depends what camera you have. Set your aperture for f14 then if you half press the shutter button you should see a small gauge appear in the bottom of the view finder with a zero at it's centre and a plus to the left and a minus to the right. Next to both of these might be an arrow symbol indicating if you are going to create an image too dark or too light. If you roll the dial on your camera you should eventually see an indicator line move across the gauge area, if you set this to the zero that's where the camera thinks it should be to take the picture. So fire it off and see what it looks like. If you're shooting against white you might find the mini is too dark. This is where you can take control though and over ride what the camera thinks and this is where it's better than using it on auto. Move that dial so the indicator lines goes toward the plus and take another shot, the white will be even brighter but the mini should be looking better. Keep messing about until you're happy with it.
Take a shot with your phone to show how you have it set up, make measurements if you want as to how far the camera is away from the mini, write down all your camera settings and next time you go to photography a mini it should just be putting in all the same settings to get decent results.
There are a few other things that I'll mention quickly, your camera will have a metering system, this is how it evaluates the light coming into the scene. If you can focus it on the mini and use spot metering you might find it gives a better result. Similarly manual focusing will probably be more accurate. For this I normally try and get it as good as I can through the view finder, then I will put the live view on the rear screen and zoom in as much as I can using the + button so I can clearly see my focus, adjusting as required and moving the image around with the cursor, you should get pin sharp results with that.
Hope that helps everyone, seriously it's worth doing, it will soon become second nature what you need to do and turning the camera off of auto will be the best thing you've ever done.
