A Simple Guide to Photographing Miniatures at Home

Given my full-time profession, I often get asked about the best way to photograph miniatures.

Sometimes, this simply comes down to the way I use complex lighting for large scale dioramas I produce in the studio. But more often than not, I’m simply asked 'How do I photograph my miniatures at home? I only have a phone camera!”.

With Lockdown in full swing (and my years of bodging sets together), I’ve decided to have a look around the house for inspiration on building my very own low-budget setup.

We'll look at producing something similar to the result below: a good quality 'hero' shot as we call it. Now this isn't a term for the model in particular, but this is the photograph to best encapsulate the miniature(s) overall. Often what you'll see on website product listings; The simplest and often most effective clean white background and nice bright light.

So this image was produced using my standard product photography setup; a high powered flash kit along with an industry standard DSLR camera. Don't fret however, as you absolutely do not need this kit to produce great and effective images to show off your fantastic paint job!

Instead for today's tutorial, you'll need the following items for your standard 25mm and 40mm miniatures.

* Camera Phone
* A4 White sheets of paper
* Desk/painting lamp
* Blu-tac or sellotape.
* Flat surface

That's it! If you want to go any larger, you're best off with a larger sheet of paper if you have one lying around.

Before we go any further, there is a very important step you must take before setting up::

CLEAN YOUR LENS

I forget to do this all too often on my phone, and it's incredible how much it affects the quality of your photo.

Set up your backdrop

So the first step is to create our background. For this, you'll need to make a corner on your flat surface, this can be done simply by using a box.

You then need to rest the paper in a curve as shown below and then secure the paper down (some blu-tac or tape on the corners works well). This is called an infinity curve, named as such that if your lighting works well, there is seemingly no end to the background.

Once you have your curve you can then place your light. LED lamps work the best I find due to their brightness, but any will do, as long as you can angle it overhead like below:

Now this is just the lamp I use for painting. It's nothing special and cost me around £25 on Amazon and I certainly didn't have photography in mind when I bought it. As you can see, it is not directly over the white background, rather it is slightly in front of the miniature (as you can see on the diagram below). Now, we do this for a very good reason: Shadows - and we'll come back to it shortly.

So now, your setup should look roughly something like this from above:

Now that we're all set, let's take some photos! On your phone (remember to clean the lens!) try and keep it level by resting it on the surface you're working on. If you have 'Pro' mode on your smartphone’s camera, then certainly take a few minutes to mess around a few of the settings and get yourself acquainted with them.

When taking the photo, make sure that the miniatures are in focus, then snap away!

So this was taken on the set shown in the previous images with my smartphone camera, It hasn’t turned out far off from the original one I shot with studio grade equipment, bar a smaller resolution. 

Remember what I mentioned earlier about shadows though? This following photo was taken with the light directly over the models:

Compared to the previous photo, the shadows are much more pronounced, leaving less detail under the robes (such as the armour on the unmounted model) and casts a very harsh highlight on the shoulders. This will be contrary to your paintjob and not show it off to its full potential!

One thing I've also had people ask me about is using the flash on their phones. Granted, it will give you a bright image, but not in the places that you need it most:

The result is far less organic and unnatural to how you'd regularly see the miniature. Due to the very directional and small aperture of phone flashes, the spread of light becomes very uneven - leading to a lack of natural shade to the figure and often blows the colours out of proportion as well.

The final step for your photo, one not often considered, is cropping. When photographing, I always leave more space around what I'm photographing than I need to make sure I have everything in the frame. The same goes for miniatures photography. What you always want to do is be able to select the best crop for your models to make sure they are the central focus of the image.

With our finished photo below, I simply made sure that the borders of the image were closer to the sides of the models. There's still a good amount of negative space surrounding them however, and this is to ensure that when posted to whatever platform you fancy, they’ll still be able to pop out on the page. For reference, Instagram uses a 1:1 square crop.

That's all from today's tutorial - a very simple and basic guide in how to make your miniatures stand out and truly show off the hours of painting you've put into your favourite models.

Next time, I'll be going over some more advanced techniques, ones that can help in small scale diorama images.

Please make sure to comment if you have any questions, and please show off your images to us!