Global Scale Modeller

One day my modelling skills might be good enough to do a tutorial. But until then here's a photo how to.

This is the pic I ended up with.


I am a photographer by trade and I have a studio with lots of lights and I know my way around photoshop. But for this tutorial I'll be using my junk room and a piece of cardboard.


The first thing I did was to make sure that there were no lights on in the room and there was no direct sunlight shining through the window. I put my camera onto a tripod and shot at 70mm. I choose 70mm as it would compact the picture and stop the wings looking too long. If you don't have a 70mm lens, a standard 50mm will be fine.

I tried the camera on it's program setting, but the spot metering saw the dark area (in the red square) and over adjusted the exposure.



Centre weighted and average metering both gave me the same result. They saw lots of white and under exposed.



So my fancy camera got switched into manual mode instead. The thing to remember is that the picture has bright white areas which need one exposure and dark shadows that will need another. And the two exposures you need are VERY different so there's no way of getting a perfect exposure.

But you can get a AVERAGE exposure! And that's usually good enough. All you need to do is put a large piece of NEUTRAL grey card in front of the model. I have a special collapsable version, but ANY mid grey card will do the trick, you really do not need to buy special photo grey card, as longs it's not shiny it will work. Drawing a cross on the card will allow your camera to focus on it and not just "hunt around ".



Metering on the grey card I choose the smallest aperture my lens had f32 ( a smaller aperture has a bigger number) and I let the camera choose the shutter speed which was 1.3 seconds. That's why you MUST have a tripod. By using the smallest aperture available, I got the biggest depth of field, so more of the model is in focus.



Now the model is pretty sharp and the exposure is not to bad, but because the light is all coming from the left, the fuselage is in shade and looks a bit dark. The high tech solution is a piece of card with two pieces of A4 white paper pegged to it.This is slid into the picture on the right and bounces back just enough light to brighten up the dull areas.



Now that's a nice pic and you could leave it there, but I'll add a bit of flash to make it pop a bit more. I've got a fancy flash gun that can do wonders. But all of the good stuff is turned off and I'm just going to use it in manual mode. The one thing I will do is bounce the flash of the ceiling so I don't get any nasty shadows.



Adding the flash at full power was to much and it bleached out the light areas



But dialling it back to quarter power looked great.



All I did to finish was a quick trip into photoshop to crop out the white reflector and clone out the crap on the background.

really handy CJ, thank you I'll try this sort of setup when I get to finish my Stringbag

do you have a 'compact' camera or could you explain how to use a 'non-SLR'?

rgds
John(shortCummins)

Very helpful tips thanks man!
Heinkel looks pretty superb too good job

This is a very similar setup to what I am currently using.

Good Info But That is like a foreign language to me. I know nothing about photography. What can the average guy do to improve his images with a normal camera. I have a Nikon Coolpix L330. Thanks

This is a great tutorial, thanks for posting!

I agree, thanks for your insight!

Cheers CJ! Very helpful wee tutorial...now wheres my tripod lol

Great tutorial. I think you might have the same camera as me, is it an alpha 900?

Avgas wrote:Great tutorial. I think you might have the same camera as me, is it an alpha 900?

Nah! I couldn't afford the 900 so I got the 850! Amazing camera for the money

Nice bits of kit. Still use my iPhone for taking model pics though...

Stick my nose in this thread so I can find it again when I need
Thanks for posting this, gotta make up a collapsable photo booth in new workshop

I use my phone to take pictures of my models. the idea is that the low quality picture hides the imperfections

mperegrinefalcon wrote:I use my phone to take pictures of my models. the idea is that the low quality picture hides the imperfections

I take your point. If I wanted to hide my kits' imperfections I would be making drawings on pieces of slate and taping them to my laptop!

I use my phone for WIP stuff and it seems ok. For gallery postings I have used my phone but have also used a Canon SLR on a tripod. Its undeniably better but I find there are 3 things that matter when taking gallery pictures, regardless of the camera used:

Plenty of light - do it during the day, preferably near a big window and/or with ceiling lights (kitchen is where I do gallery stuff)

Make it real - try and take pictures as though you were photographing the real thing (doesn't apply to boats or spaceships!!). Keep the camera down low relative to the model so it looks like you were standing next to it when you clicked the shutter. This overcomes the problem of scale


Experiment - take lots of pictures and edit the hell out of them, try the macro function if you have it for close-ups. When editing, drop the brightness a tad and boost the contrast. You get more depth and the picture looks 'older', nice if your subject is historical.

For me, the next step is to get outside. Natural light and the chance to use some real far away backgrounds. That means going full geek and letting the world see you do it - unless you have a massive garden - Lol

Its all good fun

Stokesy44 wrote: Plenty of light - do it during the day, preferably near a big window and/or with ceiling lights (kitchen is where I do gallery stuff)

Don't use day light and artificial at the same time. Day light has a different colour temperature so "mixed" lighting will give you weird colours.

It looks like your kitchen has fluorescent lights which will give a green cast, but your camera has over compensated and turned it magenta, this has knocked out the green in your paint work.

Well, I did not know that. I will bear that in mind next time I set up for a gallery post, thanks Dude.

nice tip cheers

wow thats.....fairly complex. im 15 so i really cant afford an SLR....i spend all my money on models. that was a bit of sarcasm up their tho

good tips, for my F80C reveal pics i was just planning to take them on the driveway in the middle of the day, is this a good idea? im new to this taking pictures of my models thing. cheers

mperegrinefalcon wrote:wow thats.....fairly complex.

Sarcasm aside. Don't be thinking you need lots of kit, I used a fancy camera but ALL the fancy bits where turned off. All I really used was a camera, a tripod, a big white card and a small grey one. Any camera will work with a bit of fiddling. But if you have a camera camera with a manual mode you can just follow my instructions as I've already done the fiddling.

mperegrinefalcon wrote: for my F80C reveal pics i was just planning to take them on the driveway in the middle of the day, is this a good idea?

What you need is NO SHADOWS, so best thing to do is to put your model in the shade. i.e. find a BIG shadow (like behind the house) and put the model there. If you are already IN a shadow, you can't get more shadows.

I was planing on doing another set up and using my phone to take the pics........... but I'll need to make another model first

good information. I want to break into taking pictures of the works I have done. Thanks

What you need is NO SHADOWS, so best thing to do is to put your model in the shade. i.e. find a BIG shadow (like behind the house) and put the model there. If you are already IN a shadow, you can't get more shadows.


Colour me stupid for not figuring that one out
Yet again thanks for the tips

I agree ith cj the manual mode much better i used auto mode when i got my camera in the beginning now manual all the way bit of getting use to but better results

Great post, thanks for sharing