Stage Craft

Amidst all my other projects, I've been working on improving my miniatures photography. It is amazing what even a little effort can do to improve the quality of each picture. I've been using a simple, portable photo studio for a while, but most of the pictures seen on this blog have been taken on my miniatures bench for the simple reason that I already flood my work area with light. It helps me to see what I'm doing while I work, but as an added bonus, it provides superior illumination for photography.

Unfortunately, as you can see, there isn't much open space in that area, and the background scenery leaves much to be desired as a stage for showing of the fruits of my labor.

Lately, I cleared off some table space so I could set up my little photo studio on a semi-permanent basis. One huge benefit of that is that I can now add in a whole bunch of extra lights to bring it up to my work area's lighting standards, and, perhaps, even a but higher. Even better, it is free of the clutter and mess of my tools an other detritus. That setup is what I have been using for my more finalized painting photos in my recent WIP project.

As of this past week, I have stepped my game on level higher by building a small terrain "stage" scaled roughly for 25-30mm figures. I designed this board to fit neatly into the photo booth and provide an appropriate background for some of my future projects.

With some appropriate cropping and a little work, the miniatures start to look much more like they might look on a gaming table, if you were in a mythical game store with bright and clear illumination:

 
The next thing I'm going to have to work on is some kind of back drop to place in front of the generic blue cloth at the back of the stage. We'll see what I can come up with.

Until next time...