Re: some of my stuff
Posted: 29 Nov 2009, o 16:30
Well,
I also thought that my very basic full automatic camera cannot be used for minis. Wrong. I found that a bright uniform light is essential to get a sharp picture with good color balance. Just wait for a sunny day, place the mini a little bit aside from the windows (I put a small table in the middle of my 5mx5m living room), place a sheet of thick paper behind it as a background (I use a grey one - lighter are better than dark ones, for the camera to get focus), and set your camera to normal picture mode (no macro!). Experiment with the exposition correction and add +1/3 or +2/3 if this is needed. Shot a 5Mpix picture, don't zoom. Crop it using gimp or any other graphics program, and then scale down to desired width (600pixels are usualy enough). That's it. Sometimes you may want to rebalance colors, but even this is often not needed.
Just my advice - adding artificial background requires really boresome work on cutting out the very mini from the original picture. Look at the edges of your last picture - something is missing, right? Like no antialiasing enabled in a computer game. It is really much better to work on good natural background. Or take your time while editing the picture. And another thing, the set of colors you have chosen for the background should be more neutral, and a transition from saturated blue to pink is far more distracting.
Good luck! And listen to everything what Mahon says about pictures. His are really good.
I also thought that my very basic full automatic camera cannot be used for minis. Wrong. I found that a bright uniform light is essential to get a sharp picture with good color balance. Just wait for a sunny day, place the mini a little bit aside from the windows (I put a small table in the middle of my 5mx5m living room), place a sheet of thick paper behind it as a background (I use a grey one - lighter are better than dark ones, for the camera to get focus), and set your camera to normal picture mode (no macro!). Experiment with the exposition correction and add +1/3 or +2/3 if this is needed. Shot a 5Mpix picture, don't zoom. Crop it using gimp or any other graphics program, and then scale down to desired width (600pixels are usualy enough). That's it. Sometimes you may want to rebalance colors, but even this is often not needed.
Just my advice - adding artificial background requires really boresome work on cutting out the very mini from the original picture. Look at the edges of your last picture - something is missing, right? Like no antialiasing enabled in a computer game. It is really much better to work on good natural background. Or take your time while editing the picture. And another thing, the set of colors you have chosen for the background should be more neutral, and a transition from saturated blue to pink is far more distracting.
Good luck! And listen to everything what Mahon says about pictures. His are really good.
