Picture Taking Tips?

I'm not a professional, but I love taking pictures and editing them as a hobby. I would suggest getting a nice desk lamp or some bright lights, a photo editing software such as Photoshop (although there are free picture editing softwares) a tri-pod for sturdier pics and a plain background if you want. I usually use a sheet of paper and lay it behind the figure. There's also things like lightboxes which help with professional pics but it's possible to make your own if you're on a budget. I would also suggest playing around with your camera settings to get it to your liking. Hope I helped. Here's an example of some pics I've taken with a 7.1 megapixel camera on macro setting

I think Bandy and AdamBomb use lightboxes

Never use the flash because it takes out the shadows that the sculpts make and therefore makes the figure look crap.

RSC have a major issue with this. I don't know if they use the flash or just too much light, but the figures always look awful on their pics. When you get them through and see them in a natural light, they look a million times better. It's all because the facial features and paint are eliminated/washed out by too much light.

Also, use a tripod and a timer and if you can modify the settings on your cam, keep the shutter open for a second or two to catch all the details.

I'm not a pro btw. Just basic knowledge. Here's one of my pics:

I messed around with my camera for hours when I first got it trying to figure out the best setting for taking my pics. And when it was all said and done I found out that the more stuff I had in the picture and the darker the background the better the pic turned out. So that's why I came up with my current setup as seen in the picture below.



Now I basically do nothing to my camera. I leave it on automatic and just snap and 99% of the time they turn out just fine like that. Every once in a while I'll have to choose where to set the main focus but my camera has auto face recognition and usually auto focus's on the figures face. But unlike a lot of people I leave the flash on when I take pics. With the dark background a lot of the flash gets absorbed in the background and it just leaves the figure standing out more. Now I do have some problems when it comes to taking pics of figures with darker skin tones since then the flash really lightens up the whole picture. So I have to usually mess with some stuff then. But the majority of the figures is just point and shoot.

And of course I shrink the pics before I upload them to my website to save space but for those curious as to what my full size pics look like here is the same picture as above but in the original size I have stored on my external HD. The image below is the original pic that came off the camera when I took it.

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