Moonstone…finally

The father is my least favorite of the hoomans. His sculpt really doesn’t look like his card art and he’s just not that interesting. His mail is nice though.

This isn’t my complete photo setup yet but it’s a start. Agatha was fairly unremarkable to paint. Or maybe that should be unobjectionable. I could have given her a bit more pizazz with her feather and/or flower.

Here’s an initial comparison. The Before is just with my iPhone and an tablelamp. The After is with an old but reasonably high end (for me) digital camera and a ring light overhead. I have some more lights coming. We’ll see what difference those make.

I have a telephoto, a fisheye, and a macro lens for the camera as well as the pancake lens it cam with. The After here was taken with the pancake. So far it looks like the depth of field on the macro is so narrow that I can’t get the full mini in focus and I’ll have to play around with the telephoto (45-200) and see if there’s anything interesting I can do with it.

Long and short, if you have any tips/tricks on lenses or the Panasonic Lumix GF2 for taking pics of minis, or if you have any thoughts on this comparison please let me know.

So here’s the setup currently. As mentioned, I still have the front/side lights to add. I threw in some Battle Systems terrain as a backdrop (again, inspired by @Soapdodger, praise be).

As to settings, this was taken with my macro lens, Aperture Priority, f10. For any who don’t know, the aperture has a large impact on depth of field. A smaller aperture, a smaller depth of field. The reason I wasn’t able to get the whole mini in focus, as I mentioned in the last post, was that I was using too low of an aperture (apparently a complicated combination of f-stop and shutter speed). If I set the aperture to 22 even the full background is in focus. Set it really low (the lowest this lens goes is 2.8) and the whole mini isn’t in focus.

I’ve settled currently at around f10. It does require a reasonably long shutter speed so hand-held is not feasible at that level.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Edit: just realized I “tagged” Soapdodger here with a # instead of the proper @. Fixed it.

Quack is definitely my favorite of the hoomans. In part that’s because I didn’t have to play “find the detail” like I did with the others, particularly on the face. (BTW, little known fact: playing “find the detail” isn’t nearly as much fun as playing “hide the sausage”). In part it’s because he’s just a really unique and quirky sculpt. I’ve decided to name his pet skull “Bob”.

Next up, a quick pause to paint some objective tokens for Infinity and Crisis Protocol. Then full speed into the goblins!

Edit: it was pointed out to me that there may be some resemblance between Quack and Getafix from Asterix & Obelix. I hadn’t made the connection but now that I have (though it’s certainly more an homage than a direct likeness) I like Quack even more.

There were some questions about scale on these minis. Goblin King says they’re 32mm but that’s not entirely true or useful given the wide range in sizes between the different minis/races.

So here’s a shot that will hopefully give you some context. Quack, one of the tallest hoomans, is a tad shorter than Cap who is pretty representative for Crisis Protocol (supposedly also 32mm). Quack is taller than one of the more diminutive Infinity models (28mm) but Mama Gimble, pretty representative for a gnome and many of the goblins, is a good bit shorter.

This exercise has highlighted to me how wide a range/imprecise scales in mm are. And yes, I know that I’ve been imprecise as there are qualifiers like “heroic” etc. but I figured a pic would be worth a few words.

Thanks for the button gents!

In honor of that, let me present you with two pics: one a Lloyd shot I forgot to take earlier. The other is a Gerry shot as the requested payment (in lieu of credit) for this project’s existence.