Hobby Tips: Taking Pictures of Miniatures (easy and cheap!)

I saw this pop up on a forum the other day and I figured I'd do a quick and dirty "how to" for taking pictures of miniatures for your tabletop games when you're not a photographer and have no fancy gear.

What you need:

1) A flat surface.
2) A couple of decent lamps, or a well lit room.
3) A curvable backdrop (even just some printer paper, or poster-board, etc.)
4) A camera.
5) Some simple photo/image editing software.

Your average dirty work desk...in this case I'm taking pictures of some Custodes I'm selling on eBay for a friend.

I use a box of goblins for a "back" to hold my printer paper.

You want the backdrop to curve up against the stop so you don't have any edges or creases in the picture.  There are some pro-fabric and fancy backdrops you can buy if you get serious about this stuff.

I use two LED lights (the ones I use to paint under) and with long necks I can adjust them, so I try to lower the actual light to aim at the front of the miniature, from where I'm taking the picture - this room is particularly dark with only one old overhead lamp.

Steady Hands, or a Tripod

When taking pictures, you'll want either a tripod (using a timer), or simply find a way of supporting your hands/wrists while taking the picture.  I just balance my camera and my arms on the desk etc. to give myself a stable platform when taking pics. 

I snap a picture, making sure my background is large enough that nothing shows on the edges (these Custodes are pushing it!).  It's easier with single figures.  Occasionally I use two sheets of printer paper to make the background larger.

Macro Settings

One thing to address if you're using a camera, or some phones is that you'll want to use the 'Macro' setting.  This ensures the camera is planning to focus on small or tiny things, and is generally much sharper/crisper when taking pictures of little things (or heavily zoomed in for details). 

Now with a closer picture on a single figure - you can see that even with two lamps the picture is a bit grey, a bit dark, and you can see some shadows playing around.  Not a great picture.

Photo Editing Software

This is where you grab a photo or image editing software.  I used GIMP which is like a free version of Photoshop.  It's a paint to learn to use, but even I have managed to teach myself some basics.  In this instance I'm going to edit it by doing two main things to the image: white balance, and then some brightness/contrast adjustments.

White Balance should basically take the closest thing to white in the picture and make it much whiter/brighter (thus adjusting the overall colour of the picture).  Brightness/Contrast allows me to adjust the overall appearance of the picture.

Here is a sample of a picture before and after I make these two small adjustments.  The final picture shows much more what the miniature looks like in real life.

 As taken with the camera (a simple Nikon Coolpix L820)

 With white balance and some contrast/brightness adjustments.

Now...as stated above, I'm not a photographer, but some tips and tricks to help make good pictures.