photography

Another aoption, to give your model photography a more realistic feel is to find travel posters of the locale where your model would have been in real life. Do a google search for the location and you'll likely come up with on line photos. Print these and use them as a backdrop. Here's an example, i found the picture on line, printed it on white copy paper and taped it to a styrofoam box. I placed the figure in front of it and used my regualr desk lamps to eliminate the shadows.

A cheap roll of lining wallpaper. (not sure if it comes in different colours)

Also good for those messy modelling days when you need a large 'something' to cover a table top

and great for letting the neices and nephews loose on with crayons.

If you're willing to spend $25 or so, any well-stocked photography supplier can sell you a roll of background paper that's made for the purpose.  The big New York mail order photo stores (e.g., www.adorama.com) sell it in a big variety of colors.  It's high-quality, heavy-duty stuff.  The same dealers also sell lots of more sophisticated (and more expensive) backdrop materials, for those who want to get ritzier about it.

Another, much cheaper source is "bulletin board paper."  It's sold by the yard in stores that cater to school teachers.  The store in our neighborhood has it in half a dozen different colors.  It's four feet wide; a yard-long length of it costs about a dollar.  This stuff is lighter in weight, and the colors tend to bleach out under bright photo lights or flash, but it works.

I set up a cheap but satisfactory temporary studio for shooting pictures of models.  I bought a roll of light blue background paper from Adorama and ran a piece of PVC pipe through the core of the roll.  I drilled a 1/4" hole in each end of the pipe and mounted a pair of good-sized screw eyes and nuts on it, and fastened a couple of lengths of metal chain (about a foot long each) to the screw eyes.  Our family room has a big window with a vertical blind, the top of which is covered by a valance that fits under a shelf.  I screwed two more screw eyes into the bottom of the shelf, where they're concealed by the valance.  (Total cost, excluding the paper:  less than $10.00.)  Whenever I want to shoot model pictures, I hook the two chains on the paper roll to the screw eyes under the shelf, set a table in front of the window, and pull the paper down so it lies on the table.  The lighting setup consists of three blue photoflood bulbs in metal clip-on reflectors (two clipped to pieces of furniture in the room, the other hand-held), with pieces of cheese cloth wrapped around them as diffusers.  Cheap but, I think, more than acceptable.  Here are some results:  www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyHancock/index.html

Every April our ship model club (Carolina Maritime Modelers Society, meetings at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort at 2:00 on the last Saturday of every month, Sept. through May, combined Nov./Dec. meeting next Saturday, Dec. 2, new members and visitors always welcome) holds a "photo shoot day."  I set up my crude backdrop arrangement and lights at the museum and members bring in their models to be photographed.  The first year we did it, everybody insisted on dropping money in a box to pay for the supplies; to my surprise, that day more than paid for the whole backdrop arrangement.  (Since then I've refused to take money.  Digital photography is so cheap, on a per-shot basis, that it didn't seem right.) 

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Imisspoke slightly in my post of yesterday evening.  I checked a recent Adorama ad; its price for basic, 52"-wide paper backdrop rolls is only $20.95 (plus shipping). 

One other quick tip:  set up your backdrop and table so there's plenty of room between the model and the backdrop.  That will help with the problem of intrusive shadows.

Good luck.