Let’s talk about video. If there’s one request I get more than any other, it’s for more video content. And I always dodge, because, well, video is pretty work-intensive. Photos by comparison are easy. Stupid easy if I’m just shooting bench progress shots with the phone. Still pretty easy if I’m doing photo table shots…
Category: Photography
Panel Lines: Do They Even Exist?
My recent rant against egregious panel line shading has drawn quite a hefty response. Plenty of voices of support…and of butthurt and defensiveness. A few who have mistaken the entire thing as some kind of condemnation of all pre-shading. And then there’s Tom, who left this comment earlier today. Good grief. Black basing, pre-shading, post-shading, it’s all…
Tonal Crush
I’ve touched on the idea of tonal crush in a few posts here and there, but it occurs to me that I’ve never stopped to fully explain the concept – or its implications for modeling. Time to fix that! A Brief Explanation Tonal crush is, at its most basic, the apparent loss of tonal variation…
Photo Setup – Sprue Cutters Union #27
The Combat Workshop‘s “Sprue Cutters Union” is akin to a group build, only with blog posts instead of builds. This week’s topic: Show us your photo studio A few months ago, I wrote a post about the evolution of my photo studio, so it seems a bit silly to rehash the same ground. Instead, I think…
Photo Studio Upgrade
The garage photo studio got a huge upgrade last night. In fact, I’m tempted to go all Idiocracy and call it an “Upgrayyedd” (the double D’s are for a double dose of pimpin’). Light Evolution Back when I first got back into modeling, I had a very simple setup consisting of two clamp-style work lamps…
A New-Old Bench Camera
I take pictures of my finished builds (and works in progress when they hit significant milestones) with my trusty Nikon D300s. For these “staged” shots, well-lit on posterboard, the Nikon is wonderful. But…it’s a chunk of a camera, and not exactly the most convenient thing to wield around the bench. That and, with its usual…
Unsharp Mask
At first, Unsharp Mask sounds like a technique for achieving soft-edge camoflage. Actually, it’s a Photoshop filter designed to sharpen a subject against a background. But it can be used in model photography to really make details pop. I’ve played around with it in a few of my “fake reality” attempts, but tonight I tried…
5 Tips to Improving Your Model Photography
“Excuse the picture quality, [insert excuse here]”. It’s a refrain you see often enough on message boards. Shoddy camera equipment. Total lack of know-how. Heck, I even apologize every so often when I post pictures I took with my iPhone, since it has serious white balance issues. But here’s the thing. Most of the problems…
Faking Realism
I’ve been exploring a few different approaches to photography lately. Why? Because everything I shoot looks like this: Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Compositionally sound. It shows of the model (in this case a P-51B Mustang) quite well, with even lighting that reveals copious amounts of detail. But nobody would ever confuse it…
Doogs Models 