Riiiiiight. I said I was going to explain how I made the rocks for this project , so here we go. These aren’t stunningly beautiful works of art on their own, but projects like this used to intimidate me. They’re messy, the early stages look terrible, and you have to trust that everything will eventually come together. Fortunately, the process was much easier than I expected, and I ended up with a result I was happy to photograph. I’m sharing what I tried partly to remove that intimidation factor for anyone considering a similar project—and partly to record the experiment so others can build on it. Apparently my PhD training followed me into the hobby. Materials - Foam: I used the bead-style polystyrene sold at craft stores. I do not recommend it. Get some two-inch XPS insulation foam from a hardware store instead. - White glue: Any basic white glue should work, but I used Mod Podge. - Fine sand: This adds texture and helps disguise the foam beads. - Pigment powders: I used these to introduce some color variation beneath the final gray layers. - Flocking: I bought an inexpensive pack containing three shades of plastic “grass.” - Cheap nylon brushes: Get the cheapest ones you can find. This process will not be kind to them. - Craft paint: Black, white, and brown were enough for me. - Dish soap: Just a few drops for the final sealant mixture. - **Black or brown ink**: For making washes. A Better Second Attempt These were my second attempt at building rocks for elevation in Baselair photos. My first version consisted of jagged chunks of foam sprayed black. You can see them in action here They provided the height I needed, but they never really looked like rocks within the scene. Like many of us, I turned to YouTube in search of an easy way to improve them. My process was based mainly on this tutorial Shaping the Foam I began with the wrong kind of foam. Seriously: skip the craft-store bead foam and buy insulation or XPS foam. I divided the sheet into rough five-inch sections, then drew irregular outlines inside them to create a variety of rock shapes. Using repeated stabbing motions, I cut along the outlines without necessarily slicing completely through the foam. The next part was messy but surprisingly fun: I punched the pieces apart. The foam broke fairly easily along the cuts, and those jagged breaks created some useful natural-looking texture. I also dragged the blade across the tops and bottoms, randomly removing material to make the surfaces less flat and uniform. Sealing and Adding Texture Once I had the shapes, I made a slurry of Mod Podge and gray craft paint. At this point, my main goal was simply to turn the bright white foam gray and begin sealing its surface. This first coat taught me an important lesson about drying. I covered each piece completely and left everything sitting on old newspaper overnight. Predictably, the Mod Podge bonded with the paper, and parts of it came away with the rocks the next morning. A dish-drying rack—or anything that keeps the pieces elevated—would have saved me some trouble. For the second coat, I slowed down and worked on one side at a time. I also added fine sand to the new slurry. This gave the surfaces more variation and helped conceal the obvious foam beads. Building the Color Before applying another gray Mod Podge coat, I scattered several pigment powders across the rocks. The colors looked a little alarming at first, but they added subtle variation beneath the later layers. Then came the washes: black or brown ink diluted with water. I absolutely soaked those foam blocks. It only took a couple of coats before the crevices were dark enough for my liking. Finally, I mixed black and white craft paint into a medium gray and began drybrushing. I worked through progressively lighter grays, catching the raised textures with each pass. This was the point when everything finally started looking like rock. Trust the process. Adding the Grass For the final stage, I added flocking to one side of each piece. This meant I could stack and rotate the finished rocks to create quick visual variation within a scene. First, I mixed a sealant using roughly three parts Mod Podge to one part water. I added a few drops of dish soap to act as a surfactant and help the mixture spray more evenly. Shake it thoroughly, it takes some effort to combine. I brushed pure Mod Podge onto the side where I wanted the “grass,” then heavily scattered my darkest flocking across the surface. After shaking off the excess, I applied a layer of the diluted sealant. I repeated the process with a lighter shade of flocking, using it more sparingly. That created a little more depth than a single flat color would have. The Finished Scene I love seeing everyone’s cool squares on Baselair. Sometimes the miniature alone is enough of a spectacle, but I really enjoy building an entire scene around it. Scenery may occasionally pull attention away from the work I put into painting the miniature, but creating these little environments excites and fulfills the imaginative part of me—the same part that drew me to the hobby in the first place. There was probably a more elegant solution for these photographs. Still, I had fun experimenting. I’m not normally a crafty person, and I certainly don’t think of myself as especially creative. Hopefully, seeing how rough these rocks looked along the way makes this kind of project feel a little more approachable and perhaps inspires someone else to make a few rocks of their own. How do you approach the crafting side of the hobby? What kinds of scenes have you built or hope to build someday?
I went into this as a digital (and manual) camera noob feeling like all the terminology was mysterious, overly technical and very confusing. I hope to remove at least a bit of that mystery and confusion. My mother-in-law who gifted me my camera is an avid amateur landscape and wildlife photographer so she was kind enough to show me the different camera settings and what they do and how they're related. She's not used to Nikon cameras or close-up photography, but it was a huge help to get hands-on advice from someone who knows what they're actually doing with a camera! Here's my setup: • Camera: Nikon D810 • Lens: Tamron SP 60mm F/2 Macro • Shooting distance: 12-14 inches / 30-36cm • Shooting mode: manual focus • Lighting: one household halogen bulb (28W 230V 2800K 370lm) It's a bit warm (in color) and not super bright. I'd like to try something closer to 5000K with a high CRI • Stability: I'm not using a tripod but I have the camera sitting stable on the desk, using a cabled remote to trigger the shots And here are all the settings and factors coming into play... ISO It helps me to think of ISO as basically the camera's “light sensitivity” setting. This may not be the most technically correct explanation but it's layman's terms which help wrap my brain around it. • Low ISO (100–200 or even less) = camera is less sensitive to light resulting in darker, but cleaner images • High ISO (1600–6400+) = camera is more sensitive to light → brighter, but more grain/noise After reading and watching some tutorials asserting that certain ISO settings (anywhere from 100 to 600) were objectively "the best", I read that for my specific camera, ISO 64 is often more ideal. So after trying ISO settings anywhere between 100-800, I switched to 64 (immediately saw cleaner photos) and stuck with it and adjusted every other setting around that. Aperture, f-stop, depth-of-field. Oh my! For me, the terminology around aperture was (and honestly still is) the most confusing part. Aperture is basically the size of the hole in your lens that lets light into the camera. A bigger hole lets in more light and a smaller hole lets in less light (a lot like our pupils). That part makes sense to me. The weird thing though: aperture is expressed as the letter "f" followed by a number (like f/1.4 or f/2 or f/4 or f/8 or f/16, etc ... also known as the "f-stop") and (here's the weird part) • the lower number actually means a bigger hole (more light) • and a higher number means a smaller hole (less light) Even more confusing is you might hear or read phrases like "stop down" or "stop it down" which usually means the light goes down (smaller hole) but the f number goes up ! 🤯 Anyway! The other very important thing that aperture influences is depth of field . If "depth of field" isn't a familiar term, it relates to how "deep" the camera can focus in relation to the main focused area. Imagine you're photographing a miniature wearing a backpack and holding a hammer in front of them. You might zoom in on the miniature's face and get it focused nice and sharp, but then the backpack in the background and/or the hammer in the foreground becomes a bit blurry/unfocused. In this situation, the "depth of field" is quite low or "shallow". It might actually be exactly what you want, but if you want to get the entire miniature in focus, then a higher f-stop/aperture setting can help (the tradeoff is less light and potentially diffraction of the light leading to less sharpness). But also know that moving the camera farther away from the miniature will also give a deeper (rather than more shallow) depth of field. So if you want the whole mini in focus, your 2 options are changing aperture to a higher f-stop number and/or moving farther away from the mini. Now that all that is clear as mud, here's what I ended up doing for my particular camera/setup... I read that an aperture of around f/11 might be ideal for shooting small things with my camera so I started there, but in my situation, i found i wasn't getting good depth of field so after some experimentation, i ended up going with f/16. Shooting distance As mentioned with the Aperture topic, changing the distance between the camera and the subject influences depth of field. Closer gives less depth and farther away gives more depth. I settled on shooting from around 12 inches / 30cm away (maybe slightly more). I started closer but ended up moving back after some trial and error. So far, I've only been photographing 32mm scale miniatures. I'll probably have to back up more for larger models but I'll burn that bridge when i get to it. Lighting Lighting is also a huge factor. Currently I have a pretty regular household halogen bulb (28W 230V 2800K 370lm) installed in my ikea architect desk lamp with 3 paper towels over it to diffuse the light. Caution! Light bulbs - especially halogens can get very hot. Diffusing with paper towels is a fire risk! I have the light pointed straight at the front of the mini but a bit above from an angle of around 45 degrees (maybe slightly less). Most tutorials recommend a similar setup at a minimum and many go beyond this to also include a light on the front-left and front-right of the mini to help reduce shadows. I'd like to expand to a 3 light setup eventually but the one light setup is working okay for now. I do shoot with the room overhead light on but I also use some sheets of paper to block that light to not create shadows on the model and not introduce a second light source (it's also a basement room with only a small window so having the overhead light on is not too different in the daytime and the nighttime so I don't have to think about different settings for day and night) Exposure time (a.k.a. Shutter speed) Exposure time in layman's terms can be though of as how long the camera "looks at" the subject. The longer it looks, the more light gets in (higher exposure, lighter images). The shorter it looks, the less light gets in (lower exposure, darker images). Given all the other contributing factors above, I'm finding that in my lighting conditions, a 5 second exposure time is working well for me. 4 seconds for less light or 6 seconds for more light are also pretty decent but 5 seems to be the sweet spot in my setup. Currently I leave the camera on my desk and trigger the shot from a cabled remote so that everything is super stable and motionless. White balance All of the above were getting me pretty good quality shots, but they were a touch warm in color (my light is a touch warm so no surprise) . I was fixing this color warmth with warmth and tint adjustments in photo editing software (i'm currently using the native photos app on my iPhone 17 non-pro for post-editing). But then I realized the camera had some icon-based white balance settings. I switched it to the icon that looked like a light bulb (presumably meaning I'm shooting under artificial lighting) and now the colors look a lot more accurate. Metering I don't fully understand this one, but I believe it has little or no effect (on my camera) when shooting in manual mode. Just mentioning it here as it might be worth looking into for some setups. --- So far, I've shot or re-shot the following projects with this approach: • Goblin Shaman • Hammer Maiden • The Gray Matter Connoisseur • Big Boss • Rat Man • Dwarf with Big Gun • Space Marine • Necromancer • Blue Space Marine I like some better than others, but they're all a lot better than I could manage previously on my phone. Let me know if you have any advice for increasing the photo quality. I'd love to push this even further! --- GitGud Painting has a very nice YouTube video on miniature photography with a digital camera. It's definitely worth a watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahw-ExizoO4 And Richard Gray did a really nice breakdown of the GitGud video adding some of his experiences richardgraycreations.com/photographing-m… I think the really important thing to remember is all cameras are different and people have different lenses and lighting conditions. So take precise advice (like specific settings for ISO, aperture, white balance etc) with a grain of salt. The advice is likely in the ballpark but it's also likely you'll need to tailor it to your camera, lighting, lens etc.
