More Picture Testing

Tried a few more modes on my new camera. 
Some of these pics might be a little better.

New Camera!

After many months (years?) of saving and selling off some old miniatures, I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a new camera.
Canon EOS 6D Mark II.  Standard kit lens for now, and eventually i'm going to get a macro lens.
But in the mean time i wanted to take a couple quick test shots as a comparison.

My old camera was a point-and-shoot Canon Elph PowerShot  It was a great little camera.   As I began taking pictures of miniatures I tried to learn every setting and adjustment on that camera to take better pictures.  I very quickly reached the technical limits of the camera and squeezed every ounce of performance out of it.  In order to get good pictures i had to spend a lot of time setting up perfect conditions. Optimal light, setting the white balance, ISO settings, exposure time, and lots and lots of post-processing.

Here's an example of one of the best pictures I managed to take on that camera.

If you zoom into that picture (download, save pic, zoom), you can see that to my surprise, some of the smallest details of the miniature are in pretty good crisp focus.  I was incredibly pleased with this image, but it took maximum effort on my part (and the camera's part!).

Here's the test image I just took with the new camera.

Not exactly the same angle, but close enough. If you zoom into this new picture (download, save pic, zoom), you can see that some of the smallest details of the miniature are a little out of focus; not as crisp as that other picture.  However this picture was taken with almost little effort.  I set the camera up on the tripod, put the camera in auto-focus, and pressed the button.  As far as post-processing, all I did was adjust the color temperature a bit to get close to the original image.  That's it.  I've owned the camera for 4 days and used it twice.  Basically, I have no idea how to use it yet.  And that picture came out.  I didn't even switch to macro mode.  Not too bad.

I can't wait to spend some quality time over the christmas break learning how to use this thing!

Staged Pictures

I'm still experimenting with photographing miniatures, and so I attempted to set up a staged scene and take a bunch of shots.  I was a little cramped for time so rushed a few of the shots but overall they turned out better than I expected. 

Here's the setup.  Two cheap lamps from target with daylight LED bulbs.  Grass mat laid on a coffee table, and white foamboards on the sides held up by books.  The rear board is covered with a grey matt that came with my Foldio2.  I couldn't find a suitable blue background to represent sky.  Next time!

Here's a blurry shot of the goblins.

Chaos knights...

Trying to learn about depth of field and intentionally having some parts of the picture blurry.

Depth of field again: focused on the mounted Lord Edmund, and got the pirate-hat guy out of focus (intentionally).

This shot was take very far away, and I cropped and zoomed.   Amazing how much detail my basic point and shoot Canon Elph PowerShot can get.

This was one of the last shots and definitely rushed.  Even with a little post-processing, the picture wasn't very good...

The purple wizard.

Overall, I definitely want to keep trying.