Towards the end of March I had another photoshoot upcoming, this time for a friend of my girlfriends who runs an Etsy shop doing some awesome calligraphy, cards and signs for weddings and special events. This was still a few days away, so I’ll talk more about that next post. But to prepare for this, I ordered some diffusion fabric, strong magnets and much better lights. Or at least bigger and more powerful ones, with color temp controls I really like.
I also did want to make a good showing of myself. I know from a business standpoint having at least somewhat impressive looking setup is going to go a long way. And since I was going to be taking pictures of smaller cards and acrylic signs, I needed an upgrade to the lightbox. The cardboard box with my old undershirt taped over the holes was not going to work. I picked up some small pvc pipe and corner pieces to connect it into a cube shape, cut the fabric to fit all the sides and ignored the magnets for the time being. Didn’t have time to glue them on before the next day. Just draped the fabric over for the time being.
But I needed some practice shots so I started grabbing stuff around my apartment to test the whole setup.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135mm - 1/20 Sec - F13 - ISO 100
First up was a colorful dice set I have. I knew I wanted a big depth of field, so a large f stop number. Minimal grain, low ISO. And whatever shutter speed that needed to go along with it. Probably could have tweaked this a bit better so I could get all of the edges in focus. Pretty sure I was using the wireless shutter release, and of course a tripod.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70mm - 1/2 Sec - F22- ISO 100
Similar concept and theme with the D&D, this time the demogorgon, apparently. Just another cool object from off the gaming collection shelves. Which brings me to the next shot I did, with some amiibos. I had a very specific shot in mind when I was working on this. To recreate the cover art for the Windwaker game.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135mm - 1/8 Sec - F4 - ISO 100
I also needed a shot of Ganon for this.
I actually don’t have a raw file for this one. I may have done with the telephoto, but a few weeks later when I got around to editing.
I set a challenge for myself for some photoshop practice. See if I could take those two images, and recreate this.
And…
Hahaha, seeing it again makes me laugh all over again. This was a lot of fun to work on, put several hours into the editing on this. Pulled a royalty free globe that I tweaked heavily to try and match some kind of art style, had a lot of trouble with the clouds until I grabbed my drawing tablet (another hobby now abandoned)
In the end I’m happy with it, it was fun to work on and it’s a fun image to look back at. I did have plans to do one more from one of my favorite games. Which is based on one of my favorite book series. If you like fantasy novels do yourself a favor and try out The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. The second book in the series has mention of a tabletop game the author created within the book. And then brought to life with a kickstarter campaign and another guy who does that kind of thing a lot. The cover art for the game Tak is really cool. Just a shot of the game pieces, probably with a macro lens. I tried and tried and couldn’t get mine just right.
You can look up the box art to see for yourself, I think I did a good job of copying the pieces and their positioning. Just couldn’t get my camera to be wide enough but still keep the proportions. They also had harsh lights coming from the back left of the pieces to create some nice shadows. Can’t really do that when you stick the whole thing in a light box covered in diffusion fabric. But an attempt and failure is better than no attempt at all. Only way you get good is when you fail enough to learn.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135mm - 2.5 Sec - F32 - ISO 100