Collecting figures is a lot of fun and part of the fun is getting to show them to other people who might enjoy looking at them. Sure most of your friends will humor you, if they don’t make fun of you first, so it’s not as much fun showing off your brand new figure to them. As with many things that appeal to a certain crowd, like anime and video game character figures, sharing the joy often means going online and for that you need pictures. This blog entry is a tutorial on how to better show off your figures to other figure enthusiasts on the net by taking better photos of your collection to share.
Good photography is good lighting. A lot of people think that good lighting is expensive. Wrong. The best light source for photography is free. The sun! If you’ve got a backyard use it. Shoot in the morning or an hour or two before the sun sets for the prettiest light. Those looking for the quickest and easiest way to take pics of your figs, well there you go. But if you’re in the city or in an apartment and feel a little too funny about taking a half naked anime babe outside for a photo shoot while people walk by wondering what kind of freak totes a half naked anime babe out in public, this means you’re shooting inside.
It takes a little setup, but really all you need for an indoor lighting setup are two desklamps, a couple of big sheets of construction paper in different colors, a cardboard box, some tracing paper, and some tape. Many of you have tried the desklamp thing and gotten results you weren’t that happy with, but if you use them right, you can get some good results. The best type of easy indoor lighting is a daylight balanced (aka, full spectrum) light source, because it’s close to daylight in color and it burns relatively cool, which is a plus when shooting PVC. You can use normal lights, but just watch for overheating your figures and calibrate your camera’s white balance settings accordingly.
A lot of full spectrum desklamps are supremely overpriced, but there are cheap options out there. I bought a daylight compact florescent for a normal desklamp for about $10 USD at Lowes (they don’t seem to have it on their website, but they have them in stores). I also use a cheap one from Sam’s Club and it’s great (unfortunately they no longer sell it), it’s even better when I use it as a normal desklamp. It’s 27-watts, which is the equivalent of 150-watts of incandescent light. You’ll need about that much light if you don’t want to use a tripod (if your hands are shakey rest your hand on the table and rest the camera on top of that).
Update: Some bulbs are being called daylight, that really aren’t. The best thing to do is look at the color temperature rating on the package itself. What you want are bulbs with a color temperature between 5,000K and 6,000K to get the best color balance.
It’s helpful to have a second light from above (one that’s weaker than your main light) as a hair light, but you can use a normal floor lamp or a clamp swing arm desklamp, one of these is probably already in your house. My hairlight is a 75-watt light, so half as strong as my main light. The ratio doesn’t matter that much since you can move the light to get more or less intensity.
Anyway, the typical setup for taking a picture of your figure is:
You’ve got your main light at about a 45 degree angle from the figure and the weaker lamp from above and slightly behind the figure (ignore that stuff to the side for now). You set Mizuki down on a colored paper backdrop and you’re even in macro mode and have properly white-balanced your camera when you take your picture and it still sort of comes out blah:
It’s in focus and all, but it looks like some schmoe took a picture with a cheap-ass desklamp from Sam’s Club. The main reason is the light is hard, leaving a highlight that screams plastic and shadows that are too sharp and deep. Hard light is not flattering, so you need to soften it with a diffuser. A diffuser is pretty easy to make. Basically, all you need is a cardboard box, some tracing paper, and some tape to fix the paper onto the box.
A diffuser is a filter which you shine the light through to soften the highlights and shadows so that it blends with everything in between a little more smoothly:
Okay, so the lights are in the same exact position and so is the figure. Here’s what the diffuser does to the highlights and shadows:
Okay, the light is a lot softer now, the shadows less harsh, the glare less defined. It’s getting there, but needs something to make it less dingy. The third piece you should use is a reflector to make the shadows on the dark side of the figure a little less dark. It’s tempting to use another light on the other side, but what that does too often is eliminate shadows altogether, which totally flattens the figure making those round shapes less three dimensional. A piece of white posterboard or even a sheet of aluminum foil bouncing light back onto the figure is usually enough to lighten the shadows a little bit.
So it’s a little cramped with those boxes and the posterboard reflector (the purpose of the Betty Crocker chicken and dumplings box is to hold up the reflector, fancy setup indeed), but it’s worth the small bit of effort to set up and shoot. Here’s the result of this setup:
The reflector leaves the deeper shadows pretty dark, while the larger and more open shadow surfaces were lightened up a little bit to remove some of the dinginess. It also made the transition from mid-tone to shadow a little smoother.
You can get different moods by moving the lights around or by using a shallower diffuser. Sometimes you want a harsher highlight to simulate glistening skin, for example. Sometimes you want deeper shadows. Anyway, you don’t need expensive photographic lighting equipment or an expensive camera to get some pretty decent results.
Hope I was able to help.
It depends on the angle of the lights. It can be tricky to avoid reflections, but it can be done. Also, a circular polarizer filter helps cut down on reflections.
[...] are worth to look at, even when you actually do not collect figures like me! Greatest find: * A tutorial on lighting figurines, very detailed and interesting. It makes me want to take figurine pictures [...]
[...] visiting HappySoda, a blog written by Super Rats whose site I found off of Dannychoo.com, I learned how to set up a cheap, yet effective, lighting rig and went to work on my first steps to a more [...]
greatings…
Agree…
[...] Read here on what you will need and the basic set up tips: HappySoda [...]
This article was writen 5 months ago, are you still using this setup? I found an interesting take on this matter with another approach. With the proper mods, I bet you could do something quite interesting. Check this out:
PVC Light box / light tent:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/03/pvc_light_box_light_tent.html
That’s interesting, thanks for the link. I might try something similar.
Thank you for the tutorial! I recently started buying figures and I’m semi-interested in photography so I’ll take your tips and try to set up my own mini-studio
The rest of your site is great too!
Would this also for for gundam kits?
You can use it for just about anything the around the same size as a figure.
sir, could you post the exact equipment you used for the “studio”. lights (type et al.) camera, type of paper..
I would really want to make one.
Well, what I use now is different than in the tutorial, but in practice is the same. All you really need are some desk lamps, preferably swing arm to give you some options.
I use 5000K “full spectrum” compact florescent bulbs. If there’s a Lowe’s near you, they carry it, as do many art supply stores.
For paper I use construction paper, poster board, scrap book paper, wrapping paper, and fabric. You can be pretty versatile with what you use.
Hi!
1. I just bought a 22Watt daylight lamp 1200 lumens at 6500K spectrum as my main light. Do you think this is enough?
2. I also have bought tracing paper for my light diffuser. For my reflector I also bought construction paper..would this paper serve as my reflector or should i use another type?
3. I only have N95 classic as my camera..do you think it would do justice to the gundams/figures?
1) It’s enough light if you have a tripod or the anti-shake on your camera is good. With one light you’ll probably need the reflector as the second light. You might have to adjust the white balance on the 6500K bulb. I’ve never used it, but a couple of people have told me it gives a cold cast.
2) Any white paper will do. I use whatever is handy index cards, printer paper, etc.
3) To display stuff on the net, you really don’t need a fancy camera at all. Just about anything over 4 mega pixels should be enough to get smooth color for web display.
It takes a little bit of practice to get decent results, so if it doesn’t work out at first keep trying different things to see what works and what doesn’t.
[...] websites that I’ve went through as far as gundam/figures photography. I patterned this from Happy Soda’s figure cheap lighting and Goufys lightbox tutorial. Here are the materials i [...]
I have shot my pictures using the 5megapixel setting. Would it do justice if the pics were resized using Irfanview..or do you recommend other image editing programs?
I haven’t tried that many programs, but I think most would be okay for basic editing like resize, brightness, and contrast. I use Elements, which is the stripped down version of Photoshop. There’s a few open source alternatives like GIMP. I think Google even has a basic image editor.
If you do tabletop photography check out these reflectors, they adjust with magnets.
http://www.lightrightreflector.com Food photographer love them
Gary B
Oh by the way, does your secondary light have a tracing paper too? Or is it only your main light?
My setup consists of 2 light sources both daylight at 6500k. One is 22W and one is 15W.
[...] lots of website/blogs, for some advice on the lightening. In particular, I just want to thank Super Rats for the awesome (and cheap) tutorial on this [...]
Thanks a lot for this great tutorial.
I was about to build a lightbox, but saw your article and like your method more, so went out and buy all the materials I needed and built this little studio. I have post some pictures in my blog. Feel free to take a look and give me some feedback. Thank you.
[...] I stumbled across a site called Happy Soda’s recently, and was amazed by the quality of the pictures and backdrops. A tutorial is available on the website (link here). [...]
[...] research on how to snap better photos. Stumbling across an excellent figurine photo taking guide at Happysoda, I decided to give it a try. Before this I did try using the method with Fate/Zero and Tsuraya, but [...]
[...] the shoot: This time, I used the same cabinet, but with a diffuser (many thanks to super rats for that tutorial from eons ago), which resulted in the softer lighting; therefore, less shadows, better light. [...]
Just checked this out on tomopop.com and you’ve inspired me to share my collection! Thank you!
Lauren, photographing toys is almost as addictive as collecting the toys.
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Thank you so much for this article!
This has been so helpful!
Your photos look great! My fav was Emma Ai! YUMMY!
[...] a little more self conscious than usual after reading posts by blowfish (flying pussyfoot) & super rats (happy soda). Someday I really want to make some progress with my shots but for now I gotta [...]
Thanks so much for the Tutorial.
I might need this in the event I have playsets for my figures!!
*bookmarks*
My problem is always lighting..it blurs up my pictures so I have to take them in the day.
Catch is I want to hopefully be able to take night photos for…photoshoots that happen at night.
Thanks again!
Thanks a lot for this tutorial. I did a photoshoot to my figures some time ago and it turned out kinda disastrous. With this I can try again and I’ll surely get better results!
I am just getting into product photography and this has been a great help.
[...] cardboard for background and two of my interior lamps. I tried to apply some lighting guides by super rats which I found via Valho`s blog. The tutorial suggested using daylight bulb but the only two lamps I [...]
[...] for figure photoshooting ver.2 Posted on November 5, 2008 by kusakabemisao I have shown my previous setup for my earlier figure photoshoot, but now I have rebuild it back using some new stuff I bought [...]
How big are these background papers? Where can I get them?
They’re like the size of a poster and you can gen them at arts and crafts stores (Michael’s, AC Moore, JoAnn, etc), or a regular art supply store. It’s just construction paper. Wrapping paper is fragile, but can work too.
[...] to using a white background and try every setting on my camera to get the best results. I followed Happy Soda’s tutorial closely and the result should hopefully be better. My usual indoor photo shoots usually came little [...]
Awesome tutorial. I just started a blog on figures and is very keen to get started on figure photography. This is a great help for someone like me who know nuts about photography. Hope to share the resulting photos with you soon. Cheers!
hi bro! ive been using the same set up but im having trouble emulating sharp close ups with the following settings in my dslr, ive been tinkering with the following:
25mm, f5 to f11
18mm f3.5
40-55mm f7 to f11
i always employ tripod mounted shots and there is virtually zero shake and yet focusing on getting really sharp details is something i just cant seem to achieve.
i cant seem to get the same level of clarity like yours, i followed the same set up of lighting including the diffusers, could this be a case of my 18-55mm d40 lens reaching its limitation? and whats your dslr and lens btw?
hope you can also share your focal length/exif and more advanced dslr techniques, ive been playing trial and error for quite a while and honestly, ive been getting better shots from the fill flash instead of the aperture/manual modes.
sorry for the trouble and thanks in advance!
It’s probably the limitation of your lens. Somewhere on the lens barrel or in the manual it should tell you the minimum focusing distance. You might be closer than your lens allows.
One thing you have to be careful with if you use the auto-focus is if you recompose the shot after getting focus, the camera will refocus and what you want in focus may not be. For these shoots I’m always on manual focus.
I use a 35mm Macro lens on an Olympus Evolt-500. ISO 100 and usually shoot three f-stop ranges for different depths of field. Shutter speeds are long 1/20 or longer, so tripod on a 2-second delay is what I use.
You should use whatever works for you. Fill flash gives you a higher shutter speed, so shake is less of a problem (and if you use auto-focus it greatly helps your camera achieve focus). The main reason I don’t use a flash is I have more lighting options and control doing it the way I do it. If I had three or four remote flash heads I might use that, but desk lamps are just much cheaper of a solution.
^thanks so much for the prompt response! honestly i havent tried manual focusing but will study this alternative, my shots are also around 1/20 and although the results are quite good it still pales in comparison with your very crisp snaps.
thanks again, will make tests with the manual focusing- i’ll let you know how it goes
[...] I decided to go about setting up this photoshoot area after reading a couple other posts here and here. Those articles along with articles from Dannychoo.com really gave me great pointers on how to [...]
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[...] planning on writing a post this week on how I photograph my customs. Before I could begin, I found this awesome link through another site. It is an anime website, and describes how the author takes pictures of his [...]
[...] and resolved to try again later. I received some good advice from Smithy who directed me to the HappySoda blog where super rats had written an excellent tutorial for figure lighting. I made a trip to the [...]