See Part 1 and Part 2
Photo Technique
with David Muscroft
I do not propose to go into much photo-technique. I’m hoping that camera owners will know enough to get by.
Hawk and Tornado photographed outdoors with a landscape and sky background but the very shallow depth of focus (caused by any lens being focused on a really close subject) puts the background unnaturally out of focus. In a real-life scene a general use lens pointed at an object the size of an aircraft will render the background pretty much in focus. The Hawk shot looks a little ‘wrong’, but perhaps not very obviously, because of this. Having checked the data on the jpeg of the image, I see that the lens is set to produce very nearly the maximum depth of focus. So, even with leaning on the situation with the maximum amount of photographic leverage we end up with this end result. Ho hum. Just for the record, the Hawk is shot at f11, and the Tornado at f4. A shallower depth of focus is evident on the Tornado.
This also applies to a photo-print background which might be placed behind your diorama and model.
Really, it takes hands-on experience of this set up, and seeing the results that you get to appreciate the ins and outs of what works best for you.
To decide where to focus on your model, just play around with the camera and check the results. Put simply, a quick rule of thumb might be to focus about one-third back from the nose of an aircraft model. The closer you focus, the less depth of the model you get in focus. So, a dynamic head-on shot will produce a fair amount of out-of-focus model. However, this can also be exploited to highlight any detail that you wish to show off. A more side-on view will get more of the model in focus.
Lighting
1. use available light and a tripod for small aperture shots
2. invest in a couple of off-camera flashes
3. A set up of two video lights / continuous-light lamps (probably using umbrellas to soften the light) can be a good option
Built-in flash on cameras doesn’t work, because the flash is simply too bright/strong from the short ranges we are talking about for scale model photography. The effect will be to bleach out your model and kill any of the finer details and so should be avoided.