Tips and Tricks: Briefly on photography

One of the phenomenons of digital era we are all going through now is that photography (meaning taking photos) became part of our daily lives. Well, for modelling community itself it's a tool. Same as glue or plastic scriber.  Want to get feedback on your in-progress or finished builds? Take a photo and share it on dedicated discussion forums!

Through years there's been dozens of articles committed to this topic published on various media. If you can, just grab them! There is lot of information from professional photographers included that will help you to set up your home photo studio.

My workbench. "Photo Atelier" is part of it. I'm documenting step-by-step progress on most of my builds.

Even I'm far (very very far actually) from those people, from time to time it happens to me that fellow  modeller is interested in how I take photos of my kits. Not a rocket science indeed...

Sufficient light and tripod is a must. Don't try to take photos of model holding a camera in hands and/or using built-in flash. 

Being independent on lighting conditions is one of the most important factors for me, because I have to adjust available hobbytime to needs of my precious family. Thus I have decided to grab simple quadratic Photobox. One of the smallest one actually, 40x40x40cm.  Most of 1/72 and 1/144 fits inside easily and it's not consuming that much space. I use two lamps fitted with Philips Tornado 120W bulbs. There are four basic backgrounds coming with Photobox, but I use matte adhesive foils instead (the ones used for advertising purposes).

I set my camera to manual mode always and store the photos in raw format while adjusting shutter and aperture to get picture properly illuminated and sharp entirely. The rest is adjusted later using software that came from camera manufacturer. Basically I fix white balance, levels and resize the photo before I save it in any compressed format.

My old friend, Nikon D50, fitted with 28-105mm glass that supports Macro mode as well. Six years so far and still running. You don't need latest hi-tech products to create decent results.

F-14D model I work on currently. It's 1/32 scale, product of Trumpeter..