Photographing Miniatures Part 3 - Camera Comparison

This one was a little tougher than the last post. Aside from being busy over the weekend I had to try and figure out how to actually use these things without finding the manuals.

What follows is my attempt to take the same photo with four different cameras. In each case the set up was the same. I used three desk lamps with compact fluorescent bulbs. I don't remember their exact wattage, but I want to say that they were meant to replace 60W bulbs. The two frontal are supposedly daylight and the over head was regular, probably soft white.

I wrapped my baking parchment over the housing of each lamp and used my regular black construction paper background. I used metal book ends to support the back of the construction paper, and used mini wooden clothes pins to secure the construction and baking papers in place.

Taken with my cellphone, an HTC One X, 8MP camera, normal setting.

The figure I chose was my favorite Orc Character. I painted him for the analogue challenge and you can check out the photos I took there. Those were natural light I believe. This figure does not have a lot of technique, in fact it's pretty basic, so that is the only thing I don't have to show you detail photography. I'll keep on working on my painting technique.



Fuji Finepix 3800

I bought this camera back in 2003, around the time of the birth of my daughter. It was a whopping 3.2MP and had a 6x optical zoom. When cell phone cameras were getting 3MP and upwards I realized it was probably time to look into a new camera. Here are the photos.

Macro and manual picture.

Macro and timer.

Macro and Fluorescent White Balance

Macro and incandescent white balance

Telephoto Zoom

So as you can see this old camera has some problems. It always had a bad focal length. You can't use the macro setting and zoom, you can't be up close and zoom in and remain in focus. I always had trouble with up close shots, thankfully I was not doing any hobby stuff when I used this camera.

Casio Exilim

This next camera I bought for my wife at Costco. She always thought the Fuji was too big and wanted a camera she could easily travel with. I believe it was around $140 when I bought it. I have never used this camera much, but it is fairly straight forward point and shoot. It is 10MP and has the white balance feature. The settings are a little strange, it has a Best Shot (BS) button for preset things. Here are the results.

Normal, out of the box settings.

Fluorescent White Balance

Incandescent White Balance

Best Shot (Flower). You can see the flash went off.

Best Shot (Collection). Seems reasonable, it gave some nice guides on screen for centering.

Beast Shot (Ebay). Forced the flash and reduced the resolution. Looks horrid to me.

Over all these are pretty good although I can't help but feel that the shadows on the figure aren't right.

Nikon D5100

This is now my main camera. It costs a lot of money but, for me, it's been worth every penny. I used the 18-55mm lens that came with the camera.

Macro Setting, Manual Shutter Control

Macro Setting, Remote Shutter Control.

Aperture Priority, f16, the flash went off.

Aperture Priority, f16, no flash.

Aperture Priority, f16, Flourescent White Balance

So in the preset settings you can't adjust white balance, it's on auto. The Macro setting is good but you see his finger is out of focus. By switching to one of the priority modes I can adjust the white balance and by increasing the f number I decrease the aperture size and get better depth of field. How ever I'm not sure I could do it without a remote and a tripod.

HTC One X

So this is my current cellphone. I was surprised to see it had an 8MP camera. Most of the pictures I have taken with it have been utter crap. Usually a lighting plus shaky hands issue. I have taken good video with it though.

Macro Setting, zoomed in, auto white balance.

Macro setting, zoomed in, fluorescent white balance.

Looks like I zoomed these in differently. They both look pretty good although they seem to be catching the shine of my not so matte, matte varnish.

So there you have it. I still think the DSLR takes the best pictures, but I think you can see that flooding the figure with light and exploring the camera settings can get you better results than just shine a lamp on it and point and click.

I hope this has helped some. What I would like to do is play around with the light set up more and the back grounds and see how that effects the picture. We may also need to look at post processing. The only thing I did to these pictures was crop the Fuji film macro ones and scale down all the others to between 40 and 20% of their full size.

Cheers.