Bugbear painting and photo progress

Hi All,

  I'll apologize in advance for the minutiae I'm about to present to you. One of the things I'm trying to do is get back to keeping a painting log so that I can jump back and forth between projects and not have to totally relearn/ wing it in order to match the previous figures.

  What I'm trying this time is to dab paint on a note pad and jot down the color and what it's for, taking pictures at every step. Well almost every step.

Above we have the mid layer for the flesh, Reaper Intense Brown. This is over the shade of Ruddy Leather.

Comparison against the previously finished figure. The Highlights have been added. Reaper Oiled Leather. It looks a tad lighter but doesn't have the grunge wash on it yet.

In this last picture I've added some green cloth, earth and leather straps. Home made Vallejo 896, Anita's Earth Brown and Folk Art Nutmeg.

And now a word about the photographs. I have spent a lot of time trying to learn how to use my camera better and can get some pretty good shots when I take a lot of time and control most of the variables. What was frustrating to me was that I was finding it more and more difficult to get decent pictures when I used the presets and just did point and shoot, as most workbench pictures are of necessity. Anyway I was getting more and more frustrated by what seemed to me to be too dark or just not representative colors with the presets and couldn't seem to get the various manual settings I was familiar with to compensate. That is until I tried this:

Several things got me thinking as I tried to photograph these black primed figures that were coming out too dark. Blue had asked me if I was using my flash with diffuser and I told him I wasn't. But I got to thinking, was there a way to adjust things so that I could use the flash and get the images I wanted. With Auto I was getting no flash due to the direct lighting I was using. In portrait I was getting flash but it looked too harsh. In the various manual modes you can adjust the flash, exposure and white balance but I had the aperture and shutter speed set up for remote activation and smaller aperture. It dawned on me that I should try to copy the shutter speed and aperture of the Auto setting with my lighting and exposure tweaks in full on manual mode. In M mode the little thumb dial changes shutter speed, I dialed it to 1/100 sec. Then over to A(perture priority) to thumb the dial to F5.6. The Flash was bumped up to +1.0 from something else I had tried, I forgot about it, and the exposure value was bumped up to +1.0. If that hadn't given me what I wanted I would have played around with that more. I figured that since I was using the Flash I should white balance for it. Again, if it hadn't worked out I would have noodled around more.

So thanks Blue.