picture this (2)...

Posted on September 17, 2017
Tags: photography

Internet shopping is amazing. Two days after my last post regarding photographing figures, I've got a small cell phone tripod, a remote shutter release and a macro lens with which to experiment. My goal was to use the tripod and remote shutter to avoid camera shake. The shutter release is fine. It's a simple BlueTooth device that connects with the phone. However, I'm not convinced that the tripod is of much use. It consists of three flexible legs attached to a spring loaded 'c' clamp that holds the phone. While it does just as advertised, I find the clamp to be difficult to hold open when inserting or removing the phone. I think I'd prefer something that slides to adjust for the size of the phone and is then tightened with a thumb screw to secure it. But the real issue is simply that the tripod's minimum height is about five inches above table height. Which means that I need to raise the surface upon which the figure is sitting if I want to photograph from the same level. It's an easy enough issue to fix by using a stack of books of the proper height as a platform, but it's inconvenient. All in all, the tripod just makes it trickier to line up the shot.

I find it much easier to just set the figures on the table then set the edge of the phone/camera on the table too. If I need to raise the camera half an inch or so, I just grab an appropriate number of playing cards (well, Longstreet order cards, really) to raise the camera lens to the height desired. As long as I keep the camera on the cards/table, camera shake doesn't appear to be an issue. So... the shutter release probably won't get a lot of use, either.

I installed a free, open source Android camera app for the phone. Open Camera is exactly what I wanted. This is heads and tales above the default camera app that came with the phone. As a matter of fact, Open Camera provides a zoom function from 1x to 4x. I think this will pretty much make the macro lens--which is a fixed 10x--superfluous. I'll have to experiment a bit more to see exactly what the capabilities are.

The warrior maiden who oversee my on-line shopping tells me that the 4 'natural light' LED lamps should arrive tomorrow. Then I'll really be ready to learn the ins-and-outs of miniature photography. Once the lights arrive then I'll concentrate on finding a good continuous background solution.

Meanwhile here are my test shots for today:

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