lighting for diorama photos

I guess it depends on what you want to do, produce photographs or show the details of your models. One is not beter that the other, but if you want to sho detail, you must control the light source(s). Take a look at the posts of "Sasd's" dioramas, you see the excellent detail he puts into his work by controlling the angle of the light. The marching scene above may have shadows, but the shooting angle reduces the believability of its being a photo of a real event. Maybe there's too much depth of field to have frozen the motion of the wheels. (Small aperture for depth but that requires a longer exposure.) There's also something, and I can't put my finger on it, that doesn't look right. "Matrixone's" airfield photos work very well because he places his camera at a level that would replicate a person hollding a camera and taking the picture at a scale height.
The issue of light temperature has been pretty much overcome with digital cameras featuring white balamce.
Below is my "photo studio" where all the pictures you may have scen in the figure threads were taken. The three lights can be moved around to reduce shadows and show the model to its best advantage.

I think that a diorama under natural sunlight are better than under artficial light.
But sometimes, an artificial light looks like sunset light for exemple, and it is pretty good too.

(the "what if" Rafale is yours?? it's beautiful!!!! Is there a topic where I can see more pictures of it?)

thanks for the responsees!

I brought up this topic because i always see the dioramas in FSM and other mags and go and think there's always something that makes it look like a model, and not a realistic scene. but then I saw this diorama on the web, and realized that it was the lighting and shadows that made the difference.




looks pretty real huh?

Another light source you might consider if you need to work inside are the daylight fluoresence bulbs available in different wattages... the ones I am using in my experimental table-top studio all have a color temperance of 3000 degrees (incadescent [sp?] light is usually considered 3200), don't put out much heat so I can get them fairly close to the subject w/o worrying about meltdown, and don't take a lot of power, so I can gang them into one powerstrip so I can turn them on and off with one switch.
If you are shooting outdoors, the conditions I prefer are dry, calm days with very light overcast. Direct sun tends to be too harsh and contrastly, while the light overcast gives soft shadows and allows for better overall details. In either case, a tripod works wonders for helping keep the resulting photos sharp.

jay_liang,

Sunlight works the best for model pics, even the best indoor lighting available can't come close to matching natural light for taking decent pics of my models, the colors look much better and ease of focusing are the main reasons why I gave up on indoor photograhy and prefer natural lighting.
I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains quite often in the fall and winter months so I don't get too many clear days for taking pics of my models...but thats cool, at least I can spend more time building new things to photograph next spring and summer!

A couple pics from last December...






Matrixone

basically sunlight is the best one for photos, if wisely used
but be careful with direct sunlight, cause you can get some areas overexposed and some others underexposed, or some very dark shadows
if you got a digital camera, I'd suggest you to try manual settings, this way you'll get better results after a bit of experiments

Ya know, I got some pretty good tips from someone here... I don't remember who it was though. He said that natural lighting is the best, and it totally is.

I asked one of the photographers at work, and what he does when he can't get natural light is uses halogen lamps. He said to go down to the hardware store and get some of the huge hologen work lamps. They are cheap, durable and pretty close to natural light. So, that's what I did and, so far, they've worked great. If you have little access to sunlight (and here in Chicago, that's often the case) then this is a good substitute.

~ Garth

I agree. But in the weather I'm having right now it would be impossible for a few months. That's the setback I think. (you might get a few people chipping in on how to achieve the scale sunlight effect.)