Roman Warship 50 B.C.

True dat captain. Bytes are cheap

The Professor speaks truth.  I spent about the same amount, but spread this across two bodies and a collection of lenses.  My primary use for both my analog and my digital SLR has been wilflower photography.   The Auto setting on a given camera sometimes will not well cope with both an entire field of Bluebonnets (Lupen texansis) and close-ups of same.

For a purple-blue based ship, I would have opted fot a coral, peach, or khaki back drop; but, you'd still want to tweak the white settings.

I'd likely have a laptop handy to blow digital photos up to see what sort of light-dark balance.  This is something I've started doing while on 100 miles loops through Washington County during wildflower season.  And of using the digital to suggest setting for the analog camera 9especially with a macro lens).  I still make "insurance' shots in any event.  Better to have to cull 8-900 photos for good images than to have missed a perfectly good shot to expedience.

Model Maniac,  all  cameras can be fooled when it comes to white balance.  According to the B&H Camera website, the Sony RX-100 has no fewer than ten white balance settings to choose from:  http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/984408-REG/sony_dsc_rx100m2_b_cyber_shot_dsc_rx100m2_digital_camera.html .  If you look up "white balance" in the camera manual, I'd be willing to bet there's a way to get rid of that blue cast in a few seconds. 

The camera you've got is sometimes referred to as a "bridge camera."  That means it doesn't have interchangeable lenses, but does take high-quality pictures.  It could be argued that, in some ways, bridge cameras are actually better than digital SLRs for model photography.  Using an SLR, you have to be conscious all the time of depth of field; you may confront situations when it's just not possible to get the whole model in focus.  Bridge cameras suffer much less from that problem.  But whenever you take model pictures you need to check the white balance setting.  My Pentax digital SLR (which cost me over $1,000 just for the body - no lens) has produced some downright bizarre results with its white balance set on "Auto."

Believe me, if you just leave that camera set on "program" all the time, you're missing out on a great deal of potential - and fun.

jtilley, my camera is an advanced digital compact camera - Sony RX-100 - with so many features. It's not fooled by lighting, artificial or not. I normally take pictures under natural light, outdoor under shade. It's just a shame that 15 months on and I have never read its manual, just used its intelligent+ mode and I have never set a thing. Even so, taking pictures take a lot of time. Yesterday it took me nearly 2 hours to take 142 images of 14 new pieces for my new page. They cover all dimensions and I'm going to post them in Armors, Figures, Dioramas, Aircraft and Warships Forums. The image quality seems to be better this time, some time it depends on the location of the kits and the angle of the sunlight.

Even the best modern digital cameras get fooled now and then by lighting - especially artificial lighting.  I don't know what Model Maniac is using, but if it's a DSLR or a bridge camera it almost certainly has adjustable white balance settings.  Just look it up in the camera manual.

My camera, a Pentax DSLR, offers several white balance choices (sunlight, cloudy, incandescent light, florescent light, flash, etc.), and the opportunity to try them all out:  take a picture, call it up on the LCD screen, and switch between white balance choices till you find the one you like best.  Then take the picture again.

If your camera doesn't have that feature, you probably can do it the old-fashioned way:  take a picture of a sheet of white paper, and tell the camera to set the white balance according to that.  Again, the manual will show how.

Yet another demonstration of how lucky we are to live in the digital age.  In the old days, you had to pick a roll of film that was balanced to the lighting you were going to use, or use some other kind of film and a filter (which cut down the amount of light reaching the film).  If you used the wrong kind of film, you found out - spectacularly - when you got the pictures back from the lab. 

jtilley, I didn't set anything, just shot in automatic (intelligent) mode. The bluish cast might have been because of light diffusion from the blue paper that I used as backdrop. This also happened with black paper backdrop, but not every time.

Model Maniac:  a small, constructive suggestion  All the photos in your last several posts have, at least on my desktop and I-phone, a distinct bluish cast.  It looks like the white balance on the camera was set incorrectly.

That's an insightful information, thanks! And your Gokstad looks great.

"Guillaume le Conquerant" is French for "Willliam the Conqueror."  The Heller kit is supposed to represent the ship in which William the Conqueror sailed from France to invade England in 1066.  In fact it's a typical Heller travesty - a modified reissue of the company's "Drakkar Oseberg," which was a miserably inaccurate sort-of-replica of the Oseberg Ship, one of the two large vessels on exhibit at the Viking Ship Museum in Norway.  

Historians have established that WIlliam the Conqueror's ships didn't actually look much like Viking longships - and still less like the Heller disaster.  Anybody interested in a model of a Viking ship would do much better with either the Revell or Emhar kit.  Both those are excellent.  Here's a thread about a model I built from the Revell one:  cs.finescale.com/.../1701192.aspx .

The larger of the two Imai Roman warship kits is still, I think, available under the Academy label.  I've got one in my stash.  (I bought it as a project to build with my grandson, but it's way too complicated for that purpose.)  It's a superbly molded kit; Imai was, I'm fairly certain, the only manufacturer to figure out how to make realistic injection-molded deadeyes.  But it has the same big problem that the little kit does:  half the oars are missing.  Two possible solutions:  buy a second kit just for the oars, or use the kit oars on one side of the ship and display it on a mantle or shelf, with the oar-less side against the wall.

Imai arguably made the best plastic sailing ship kits ever to come on the market.  Unfortunately the company went bust in, I believe, the early 1980s.  The kits turn up now and then under the labels of other manufacturers.

Felix C., there may be a larger version (1/45) as you, jtilley and Tnonk pointed out though I have never seen one.

itilley & Tnonk, thanks for your information, I've never known that before. Never seen an Amai kit. As for ancient warship, I had another one built many years ago. It's Heller's Guillaume le Conquerant 1:60

falconbbs.com/m33-126.jpg

Is this a Viking warship? and what does the name mean? warship of conquerer?

If the Aoshima kit is a reissue of the Imai Kit, then the Kit should be 1/350.  At least that's what scale was listed on the auction when I bought my Imai small scale Roman Warship.

However, it doesn't list that on the Imai box (at least not in English).

The Imai kits hull is approximately 16 cm. I would guess that the bowsprit could add the additional 2 cm's to bring it to the 18 cm that was mentioned in the post above.

I guessed that the scale was small when I looked at the rigging. My 1/72 Academy Roman Warship has considerably more detailed rigging in the larger scale. (I believe the Academy Kit is also a reissue of the original Imai Kit because the look is so similar, but I'm not 100% on that.)

I have the small scale Greek Warship by Imai in the same scale (1/350?).  However, the Greek Warship doesn't have the scale listed on the kit's box either & it's hull measures approximately 16 cm's also.

Both kits are in Imai's Mini Sailing Vessel Line, the Roman Warship being # 2 (B-290-200) while the Greek Warship is listed as # 3 (B-291-200).

Hope this helps.

Adrian

The excellent Japanese company Imai used to make two Roman warships, one in a tiny scale, the other considerably larger.  I think both were eventually reissued under the Aoshima label.  like all other Imai products, they were beautifully molded.  Unfortunately, though, both kits had the same big problem:  they don't have enough oars.  The hulls are configured as biremes (two rows of oars on each side).  The designers apparently didn't understand that the holes in the big sponsons over the oars in the kits were supposed to accommodate another row of oars.

180mm? There is a larger version in 1/45. Your build appears as detailed as the larger one.

Thanks. I think 1/45 is too small, it should be around 1:400 - 1:200

The kit is 18cm long, if 1/45 then the real thing = 18x45 = 810cm (too short), if 1:400, the real thing = 18x400 = 7200cm (72m, more probable), if 1:200 the real thing = 18x200 = 3600cm (36m, most probable).

Very nice. I believe it is 1/45 scale