How do I take good Photos of my Model?

(For records, illustrating articles, and/or web pages.)

Photography Guidelines for Seaways' Ships in Scale Magazine

by

Clayton A. Feldman

Although many ship modeling writers are talented photographers, all writers for Seaways' Ships in Scale need to develop at least basic photography skills to clearly illustrate their articles. It may seem like a lot of extra work, but proper model photography is really quite simple and mechanical. It should be no challenge at all to the modeling writer who has put hundreds or even thousands of hours of work into his project and who now wants to share it in great clarity with his readers. Basic, readily available equipment, plain backgrounds, plenty of light and adequate depth of field will do the trick every time and will make your readers grateful.

Technologic advances change all fields rapidly, so my old article on black-and-white photographic techniques as the recommended basic process for ship modeling article writers, as reprinted in the January-February 1998 issue of this magazine, needs a lot of re-doing. The new camera-mounted bounce flash diffusers and the new, forgiving color films from Kodak let us work easily in color, and here at the magazine we can just as easily convert it to black and white when we need to in our pre-press process. Our new suggested photographic process also permits us to do away with both multiple studio lights and the tripod-cable release combination for most (but not all!) model photography. That is step in the right direction!

Everyone who takes photos and has done any level of self-education on the subject knows that photography is the science of lighting control and that relatively soft, reflected light is the best of all types for most work. That's why the basic professional studio lighting setup includes three photofloods in reflectors aimed backwards into reflective umbrellas, all set at particular pre-determined angles and heights relative to the subject. The rather soft, indirect light from this sort of setup best highlights details in the subject and avoids harsh shadows in the background. Flash or strobe generated direct lighting is very harsh and causes both glare and deep shadows. Ordinary ‘bounce' flash, where the light from the rotated strobe is reflected off the ceiling onto the subject picks up the color of the ceiling, causes loss of lighting intensity and rarely generates enough directed light to show detail work. What I had recommended in the past was the use of three hardware store aluminum reflectors on stands, each with a regular 300 watt bulb softened with a couple of layers of cheese cloth, used together with black and white film so that color temperature (matching lighting type to color film needs) wasn’t a problem. That plus a tripod and cable release (needed because of the long exposures required) is really a lot of equipment- and, it doesn’t allow for color photography. But now, with most of the whole umbrella system incorporated in miniature fashion right on the camera, the equipment list goes way down for all but extreme close-up shots. Such a system is free of both tripod and cable release because we are shooting with our flash attachment and therefore at hand held shutter speeds. What an advantage! If you've ever tried to raise your tripod using boxes next to your workbench to get your camera high enough to maneuver into a cramped spot over your model for a particular angle shot, you know exactly what I mean. Finally, this technique we’re speaking of is color-correct, and as you probably know, we magazine publishing types can easily convert color prints for use in black-and-white articles, but of course we need color prints for the covers and the Reader’s Showcase.

Basic Model Photography Equipment

The new recommended photography basics for Seaways’ Ships in Scale writers has thus been simplified a bit and the suggested equipment changed. The new basic ship modeling writer's photography closet now contains the following gear:

1. A 35mm SLR camera with manual controls and an adjustable macro lens or a zoom lens with a macro setting.
2. A shoe-mounted strobe (a flash unit that mounts on a slide-in fitting on the camera body) and a portable flash diffuser attachment.
3. A single aluminum reflector on a stand, used with a 250 or 500 watt blue photoflood bulb.
4. A roll of seamless backdrop paper (standard 53” width; light blue, white or light gray in color).
5. Kodak Gold 200 ASA film.
6. Additional Equipment Needed for Extreme Close-Ups:
   1. A macro lens, perhaps with an extension, or a set of close-up lens attachments or a reverse mounting ring for your 50mm lens.
   2. A second blue photoflood on a stand.
   3. A camera tripod.
   4. A cable shutter release for the camera.

That’s not too bad is it? We’ve eliminated the tripod, the cable release and one light stand for all but extreme close-up work and we’ve enabled hand-holding of the camera for all but extreme close-ups. Because extreme close-ups (1:2, 1:1) are not needed for many ship modeling articles, all of the equipment may not be needed. It may all seem like a lot of gear, but it’s all necessary because of the fact that direct photo-flash snapshots, as we mentioned, have much too much glare and lack sufficient detail for magazine publication and that bed sheets as backdrops generally look wrinkled and thus very crude and unprofessional. (If you're taking a single photo for our "Reader's Showcase", a heavily starched and carefully ironed bed sheet will probably suffice, but please, no living room or similarly busy backgrounds- they are very distracting!.) Here's a more detailed description of the equipment and its use:

• Camera: Any basic or better 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) camera will do. Bells and whistles are not needed. A shoe-mounted strobe is necessary, as the flash head must be rotated to the right to function with the diffuser shell and built-in flashes do not rotate. A flash unit with TTL (through-the-lens) capability is much preferable to any manual type, as the camera’s computer does most of the exposure calculation for you. A portable camera-mounted flash diffuser is also needed (see below) to bounce the flash.

  For extreme close-up work, say 1:2 or 1:1 (in 1:1 the subject photographed and the image on the film are the same size) an adjustable macro lens is far and away the best-performer and is the choice for the serious close-up photographer. Some macros go all the way down to 1:1 with the lens alone. My Nikon Micro-Nikor needs an inexpensive extension ring to use for the 1:1 shots, but 1:1 is rarely needed. You can, however, use a standard 50mm all-purpose lens with either a set of screw-on close-up lenses (commonly called ‘diopters’) or a lens-reversing ring (your regular 50mm lens will take close-ups if it’s used backwards!). You can buy special reversing rings quite cheaply at the camera store). The very popular semi-miniature, fully automatic 35mm cameras so widely available now will not do for our purposes, at least not for anything more than a less-than-desirable single photo for the Reader’s Gallery.

  Extreme close-ups generally also require a tripod and cable shutter release for the camera, as one’s natural body tremor gets magnified like crazy at these very close distances and there’s not enough room to let a flash diffuser shell function properly.. A single leg brace (monopod) may do the trick for you in these close quarters and avoid the necessity of buying a tripod or trying to twist your tripod into a pretzel for the odd angles that these extreme close-ups require. I must confess that I have done some hand-held bounce flash extreme close-ups with The Shell that have turned out pretty well; they would have to be cropped for publication, however, because of underlighting in the periphery of the prints.

• Film: Because of its wide latitude, forgiving nature and relatively fine resolution, Kodak Gold ASA 200 is probably the best all around film choice for our ship modeling articles. It has a very wide latitude and is therefore essentially self-corrects minor lighting errors. It holds its resolution very well at this somewhat faster ASA rating. This faster film speed (pros often use ASA 100 or even ASA 25 film for greatest sharpness with enlargements) allows for hand holding and for smaller f-stop choice for greater depth of field. I’ve also experimented with Kodak Gold ASA 400 and found very little if any detectable difference. Standard size prints are fine for all magazine purposes. Slides are not necessary and ordinary Kodak CD photos in jpeg format are of no use to us at all.
• Background: The single most common defect in casually taken ship model photographs is lack of attention to the background. A fully-rigged model on a fine coffee table may look wonderful to the modeler and his guests, but the sofa and chairs and sideboard in the background are very distracting to the magazine viewer. What we want in the background is nothing and that is best achieved by the use of white, light gray or light blue seamless backdrop paper, generally spoken of by photographers as seamless. This paper comes in rolls about 53” wide and can be hung from the ceiling behind your workbench on a pipe or broomstick. When you need your photo 'studio', just clean off your workbench and pull the paper down, forming a nice smooth curve at the back of the bench and thumbtack it down to the front edge of the bench. Pieces of seamless can also be taped to the kitchen wall and rolled over the top of a cabinet or table, etc.

  Less desirable but still useable is the photo taken with the model set on a large sheet of white cardboard and photographed against a background of the same material.

• Lighting: Lighting is the most difficult part of the photography process for the non-professional. Problems that we have to consider include glare, shadow formation and flatness. Glare creates bright spots in the picture, masking detail and drawing the eye to the defect itself. Overly even lighting (flatness) obscures detail, a very undesirable effect in ship modeling. Deep shadows are distracting and give a toy-like appearance to models. Professionals prevent these faults in conventional lighting technique by using three lights at different levels and at different angles relative to the model, all reflected into the model with umbrella reflectors. We can achieve much the same result with a portable flash diffuser on the right side of the lens for illumination, avoidance of glare and detail accentuation. The shadow generated to the left is reduced by using a photoflood in a reflector to the left of the subject.

  I own and use ‘The Shell’ reflector , but other brands are available including the ‘Lumiquest Pocket Bouncer’. Judging from the photos in photography magazines, I'm pretty sure either type would work well. You could even jury rig one in your own workshop by bolting a small aluminum reflector to a stick of wood which in turn would be bolted to the tripod socket on the bottom of your camera. The socket hole in the camera would have to be covered with an aluminum foil patch, glued in place with cyano-acrylate cement.

  The Shell is a lightweight molded plastic bowl, slightly elongated, black on the outside and white inside. One end is cut away and extended to form a cuff that fits around the camera-mounted flash to be fixed in place on the right side of the camera with velcro strips on the flash unit. The mounted flash head must be rotatable to the right to fire into the bowl. On my camera, a Nikon FG with the smaller SB-15 flash attachment, with the flash unit rotated into the vertical postion, only the small flash head rotates to the right. The cuff on The Shell needed to be carefully whittled away with an X-Acto knife to fit the flash and the flash head. In use, it is held in place not with velcro, but with a four inch brass modeler's bar clamp; seems appropriate to me!

  The Shell, being offset to the right of the camera, casts a fairly dense shadow just to the left of the subject. A standing light on that side both eliminates much of that shadow and gives us enough extra light for another f-stop of exposure (for example, being able to go from f16 to f22) to increase depth of field. A single clamp-on type 10” diameter aluminum reflector from the hardware store fitted with a blue photoflood bulb does the job. The blue photofloods match the color temperature of the Kodak Gold film very nicely for an accurate color rendition of your model in the prints. I suggest a 250 W bulb for small models and a 500 W bulb for large models. The blue coloring of the bulb tends to reduce the need for any diffuser in front of the light; there is much less ‘spotlight’ effect than with white bulbs. I had an old photographic light stand to use to hold the reflector, but you can get away with clamping it to any sort of upright from a broomstick in a Christmas tree stand to household step ladder.

• Composition: To professional photographers, who are experts at equipment and lighting, composition becomes one of the most important challenges of their work. For ship model photographers, it is much simpler- just fill the view-finder with whatever is most important to the message that particular photograph is intended to convey. If the message is the structure of a gunport, try to fill almost the whole view-finder with that gunport. If it's the finished model, fill the whole view-finder with the model (being careful, of course, not to cut off the tops of the masts or the tips of the bowsprit in sailing ships!) What we don't want is extraneous background material in the photos, nor do we want to see the whole side of the ship when the subject of the shot is just that single gunport we just spoke about.

  If filling the view-finder is not possible with your standard 50mm lens, then switch to a macro lens or screw on one or more close-up attachments, commonly called diopters, until you get a satisfactory close up. Also available are reverse-mounting rings for standard 50mm lenses. The standard lens, used backwards, functions as a pretty good close-up lens, although your camera’s automatic features will not work in this mode. If you can’t fill the view finder, do the best you can and we can crop it later. That's all there is to it at the basic level.

• Depth of Field: The final consideration for the Seaway's Ships in Scale photographer is making sure that the object of his photographic intention is in focus. This sounds pretty simple at first thought, but when you recall that the closer your lens gets to your subject the narrower the band that is actually in focus (depth of field) becomes, the concern becomes quite real. With a close-up lens on your camera and the camera film plane (near the back of the camera) only ten inches from the subject, the depth of field may be down to as little as 1/2". Well, if the hatch cover detail you are trying to illustrate is 3/4" wide, you have a real problem! Since camera-subject distance becomes fixed by necessity- that is, you have to get close enough to your subject to fill your view finder- one must maximize depth of field by using the smallest aperture (highest f-stop number) on your camera that will give you sufficient illumination.

  With most strobes, shooting a maximum power shot will cause a warning beep or diode flash to let you know the match wasn’t ideal and that another shot with the lens a bit more open is indicated. We are maximizing the amount of light that gets to the film through these smaller apertures by concentrating our light with the diffuser and the photoflood and by using a faster film speed.

  "Bracketing" is probably a good idea for insurance purposes. Bracketing in our case is the process of taking extra photos of the same subject on each side of the idealized first choice exposure. First we take our basic shot with the built-in through-the-lens flash setting for our particular camera. Then we repeat with, say, one smaller aperture and one larger aperture. Another way of doing this, and the method I generally use, is to take all my shots at f8, f11, f16 and f22. These extra shots or bracketed exposures will almost certainly include a 'keeper'.

• Processing: We have a clear preference for quality processing, such as provided by Kodak Labs, as compared with the usual ‘one hour’ type of photo finishing. One reason is that bracketing only works with professional or direct to Kodak film processing. The ‘in-house’ one-hour developing and printing machines tend to average out all photos to computerized standards, so all of your similar photos will appear identical. Overall quality and attention to detail tend to be much better, and Kodak provides a very useful Index Print with each order now, containing mini-prints of each shot on the roll for quick identification and sorting.

  By the way, each print submitted needs to have a label stuck on its reverse side. Don’t write on the prints; it probably will show through. Just type the print numbers and your last name in lines on a mailing label (I can get about four such lines on one ordinary label), cut them out with scissors, and press on the back of the (proper!) photos. A little arrow indicating the top of the photo is a good idea. If your equipment didn’t allow you to fill your view-finder on close-ups, cut and tape a mask (a piece of paper the size of the print with a view window cut out of it with a sharp knife) over the print suggesting the area to crop to the layout person.

Summary:

A simplified method of color photography has been presented here in which a hand-held camera with a camera-mounted strobe light and a shell-type bounce flash diffuser work together with a single photoflood lamp and a seamless paper background to form a complete but portable modeler’s photographic studio for everything but extreme close-up work. The latter function is served by the addition of a tripod and cable release and one more light. These processes cover all of the photography skills necessary for magazine articles, both in color and for black-and-white conversion.

Happy shooting!

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