Taking Pictures What am I doing wrong?

[beowulfthehunter]

Ok, I am a decent painter I know how to get better but I lack patience to do it right. Now the thing that gets me is taking pictures.

My current set up is a 16inch square light cube with a 100 watt bulp on the top and a 40watt daylight bulb on the side. I use a 3.2 Megapizel HP Photosmart 733 camera. Adjusting the light I took the first two photos. Then after not getting the effect I like I said \"f-it\" and tossed the cube, put the white sweep on a box but the 100 wat light above the figure and the 40 watt to the side and took the last picture.

 

[DrEvilmonki]

I don\'t think your bulbs would be powerful enough for a light cube. I use a 105 watt energy efficient bulb above (equivalent to about 600 watt) and two 65 watt energy efficient bulbs on the sides (about 400watt each).

I then manually adjusted my light options, taking 3 pictures per option (on three different exposure settings) until I found one I was happiest with.

 

[chrismisterx]

Sorry cant help with your photo problems, as i am finding talking photos tough aswell.

But just want to say, love the model, the armour is great

 

[frenchkid]

The first picture looks like you used too much yellow light and didn\'t have the right setting on the camera, second photo looks like it\'s not focused, so I\'d say take the picture from further out, with good quality setting you shouldn\'t have any probleme getting a good size for you mini. And the last photo looks spot on to me, just lacking the white back ground behind.

What I do with my not so fancy camera:
-get a sheet of white paper lying around, get it to lean against somthing (cup of tea most often), and place the mini on it.
Then place camera on a pile of books about 15-20 cm aways, put macro and timer. Get all the setting right (Iso 200, good light setting, high quality).
-Press the button and get away from the desk so as not to have things moving when the camera goes off.
-Photoshop: crop, reduce image to right size (they usually are 2500 pixel wide out of the camera), auto color, auto contrast, auto levels, adjust colors manually if needed (not very often), and then put on CMON.
-Hit refresh every other second to see how your score is doing

 

[airhead]

I don\'t know what controls you have on your camera, but the second pic is close.

the 100 watt bulb should be color corrected too - thus the yellow hue in the first pic. Room lights will affect the hue of the pics as well.

40 watts is not enough for the cube.

I use 2 halogenA bulbs at 100 watts and think I need to add a third.

Is your camera on a tripod? this is a necessity to avoid blur. Set the exposure for the longest amount of time that the camera will allow - generally I go between 1/8 to 1/4 second. Set the camera to for delayed shutter so you don\'t bump it as you push the button.

Make sure your light meter is reading the mini, not the average (I can see a little box for my meter). If you don\'t have this option, consider a medium gray backdrop in your cube or the minis will be underexposed no matter what you do. Get a 30% gray card from the camera shop, a piece of gray velvet or medium blue velvet or print out the blue-white fade from the link in my sig.