Transcript
Oh boy, I don’t know what we’re doing today, this came out of left field. Like most random ideas. And, full disclosure, I’m writing this part of the script right after pulling cards outta cameras, I ain’t even looked at the footage or photos yet. And I just poured a glass of peanut butter stout – thank you, patrons – and I got music blaring in my headphones and I’m just trying to hope I’ve got something interesting for ya today. Which in my current reality is an ever-present question.
And this is undoubtedly strange already, ‘cause I’m describing where I was … four weeks ago? But when I was writing this, it was now. I mean, back then. This isn’t how this is supposed to work, but sometimes … yeah, sometimes, hey, sometimes we just gotta roll with it.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes … the schedule just gets weird and your host just does something on a whim.
And we thank our patrons for blindly supporting those whims.
So today was supposed to be a skirmish game related topic, and just so you know, I kinda sorta had a plan. I wanted to do a, like, here’s how I photograph my minis sorta thing. I thought I might take pics of a warband, you know, but then a couple of things happened.
One, I realized I don’t really have a cohesive warband … yet, that’s coming soon. And two, I had to shoot a particular shot for the Mystfin Isle trailer. And I thought, oh, maybe some of you dear viewers might like to see how I go about shooting something like that. Which really isn’t a big deal, it’s basically recreating the shot from the Tabletop Alchemy intro. But I got this new stuff to play with – aerosol atmosphere. So, everything just sorta turned into whatever the hell this is gonna be edited into.
So we’re gonna talk some camera stuff today, some lighting, some smoke and mirrors and there is a point to all this, a moral so to speak, but that comes at the end. Don’t get greedy, enjoy the ride. ‘Cause, you know, the ride is all we got.
Oh, and also, I guess, uh, welcome to my apartment. Slash makeshift studio. Imagine I’ve offered you a beer. And a place to sit. Somewhere. Maybe under the hobby desk over there.
All right, so I’m setting up a manual slider on which we’re gonna put a Sony a7iii with a Tamron 1 to 1 scale 90mm macro lens. Oh, here’s a Rowan Witchbane cameo for ya, all right, then I’m putting up down some light stands and a c-stand. Now I’ve got this little Amaran 60 D, we’re gonna use that for the backlight – I’ll put some links to all this stuff in the description in case you wanna check ‘em out. So then I’ve got a Nanlite something or other for our fill or key light and we’re gonna throw a soft box on it to, you know, soften the light.
I’m gonna build the set on my trusty 3×3 skirmish table and I’ll put down my standard forest-y print gaming mat. I have yet to build any kind of physical terrain board, I typically use gaming mats just, you know, because they’re easy to use at this point. I’ll drag out every bit of jungle/tropical scatter terrain I’ve got and I arrange it after hooking the camera up to the LCD monitor on the painting desk. Being able to pipe the camera image out to a monitor makes dressing a shot to the camera frame way easier.
And here’s my super advanced, patent-pending, technical dice rolling rig, which will, you know, help get our die right where we want it through careful measurement of angles and physics calculations and other, you know, secret proprietary sauce. And then we’ve got the main ingredient for this whole shebang, the can of smoke.
Now all I need is an extra pair of hands, which, you know, I can probably order that on Amazon.
When I did the channel trailer shot, I was using a small fog machine and I was doing a push with the camera, so I was able to gun the smoke, push the camera, roll the dice all at the same time. And yes, I did like 90 takes of that shot, and no, that’s not an exaggeration. Hey, sometimes you just go until the magic happens.
But this time I wanted to do a lateral dolly move on the slider and I needed two hands just to operate the camera. The die roll and the spray can operating required another pair of hands. And sometimes magic happens in the form of a friend. My buddy Shadow came over just to help me out for twenty minutes. And for beer. Fair’s fair.
And, of course, sometimes, completely after the fact, you realize you did everything … wrong. But we’re in the business of salvaging – at least that’s that business I feel I’m in most of the time, I salvage what I can and try to remember not to do it wrong the next time. This’ll make sense in a moment.
So, I realize the subject of photography is it’s own entire iceberg of a thing and we’re in the weeds here without any sorta plan or map or you know, forethought. I’ll just point out a couple things I did right and a couple I did wrong and maybe there’s something in here that you can use or maybe it’ll inspire you to check out more in-depth photography stuff, I don’t know.
One thing I wanna touch on is the “gear factor”. Obviously here I’m using video production lights that I have on hand and I’m using a mirrorless camera with a specialty lens, but the lighting concepts should apply independent of gear. There might be some technical limitations here and there but you could do the same kind of lighting setup with household bulbs. And you can shoot with any kind of camera, cell phone, et cetera. There’s basically only one specific effect that you may not be able to get with a cell phone but I’ll point that out when we get to it.
So we start with the backlight. Ridley Scott once said that when in doubt, stick a bright light in the background and shine it into camera. The one quality you want for your backlight is “hard light”, so in most cases you don’t want to put diffusion on the backlight or use a soft light for the backlight. But see, even that’s not necessarily true. You may very well want a softer light for the backlight. It all depends on what you’re going for. What I’m going for here is a hard edge that will kinda represent sunlight and will make the silhouettes of everything hit by the backlight pop and become more defined from the background. But really, it’s main purpose here is to backlight the smoke. You’ll soon see as the smoke boils up into the foreground that our fill light just starts bouncing off the smoke and obscuring everything behind it. Smoke and rain are two cinematic elements that are almost always shot with backlight.
Now we need the fill light to expose everything we can’t see on this side of the backlight. If you were shooting outdoors or using the sun as your actual light source, it’s so powerful that it’s light will bounce all over the place and do a lot of the filling for you. But our little light here isn’t gonna do that. So we bring in this big ol soft box, cause I want to fill in the shadows and expose everything properly. Now, it’s all about balancing the exposures of the fill and the backlight. And like everything else, you can just adjust this to your liking.
One of the most important things of course is arranging what you’re actually shooting. Since I’m moving the camera for the shot, I want some foreground elements that just peek into the frame because they will move in parallax with background, giving us this sense of layers within the frame. If we didn’t have these foreground bits, the camera move would be much less noticeable and kinda irrelevant. This is where using a cell phone might not give you the prettiest look and that’s because of how the size of a camera sensor affects the depth of field. The smaller the sensor the larger the depth of field. Meaning, more stuff is in focus. I can kind of demonstrate this along with how your f-stop also affects the depth of field. So here in this single shot, if you pay attention to the skull rock in the background, you can see that at a stop of F 9 the skull rock is much sharper than at an F 2.8. Now, getting into what an F-stop is and aperture and all that stuff, I mean, if you’re curious about that we could do another video where I kinda go in-depth on photography stuff, but again I think you can find all that stuff out you know elsewhere on YouTube but I should have taken a shot with a cellphone to show you that too but with a cell phone, almost everything in this frame would be in focus.
Now sometimes that’s a bonus when shooting miniatures. With full frame sensors it can be a real struggle to get the depth of field large enough to even keep a single miniature in focus. Such as here in the slider shot. You can see the depth of field is really shallow, and I’m shooting at an F 9 which is typically what I try to shoot miniatures at just to keep a single miniature’s detail in focus. But at the same time, the foreground elements are nicely soft and that’s exactly what I’m looking for with this type of shot.
Now let’s talk about the canned smoke and the major mistake I made. As I mentioned, I’d had this idea about doing a little video on photographing a warband with atmosphere. And I kept thinking of this one shot I wanted to try to get – and we’re gonna look some still photos in a bit where I try to do just that. I wanted to get the smoke kinda boiling up around the miniature, in a still shot. So that idea was in my head and I didn’t adjust my thoughts when doing this moving shot for the adventure trailer. So I asked Shadow to roll the dice and gun the smoke at the same time, which was the wrong thing to do. So every take we did has a lot of movement going on with the smoke. But what I really wanted with this moving shot was the smoke drifting in curls and waves across the space, which means I should have asked Shadow to gun the smoke, wait for a few seconds and then do the camera move and the die roll. But I didn’t do that. Instead I’ve got twenty seven takes like this.
Now, there’s definitely a few shots that’ll work and actually one or two that kinda did what I wantededed to do, wantedededed? wanted to do accidentally. But I did do an hour or so of kicking myself after the fact, you know, as you do. Or at least as I do. I mean, could I rebuild the set, put the lights back up, ask Shadow to come back for another beer? Sure. Did I do that? No. That’s why Ridley Scott is working on huge studio pictures and I’m working in an apartment. If the shot was 100% garbage, I would have redone it, but it’s just okay enough for me to be lazy about it.
And as for this can of smoke, it’s kind of expensive even though it is convenient, but you can do the same kinda thing with a cheap fog machine from the Halloween store. Which is again what I used for the channel trailer shot. Another thing you’ll notice is that the smoke rises and turns into haze pretty quick, which is typical of most water-based fog machines, disco foggers, what have you, but this aerosol can stuff dissipates way quicker than the fog from a fog machine. If you want that cool, low-lying fog effect where the fog sits on the ground like a heavy mist or something, that requires a temperature shift. So you can get that effect with dry ice in water or using an expensive fog machine that chills the smoke as it vapes out. Those are kinda used in like stage productions and stuff.
But all that said, having a little can to wave around and spray smoke out of is just kinda fun to mess with. Now we gotta wait for the smoke to clear.
So, like I said, we did a bunch of takes, just looking for a combination of good camera move, good dice roll and good smoke to hit all at once. I even kinda like this random shot of Shadow’s hand picking up the die, I should have done an actual shot specifically to capture that type of action. But, you know, that’s part of post production, noticing all the stuff you coulda-woulda-shoulda done.
Now after we’d wrapped this shot and Shadow took off, I still wanted to mess around with the aerosol atmosphere and do some still photographs. So I grabbed my award-winning troll kin shaman and posted him up in the scene and adjusted the background terrain elements and tried to figure out how to actually capture some photos on my own.
Also, jingle jangle! In case you don’t believe me, that’s it’s an award-winning miniature. Jingle jangle.
So this camera has a timer setting, like most cameras, but what was really handy is that it has a secondary timer function where it’ll snap 3, 5 or 10 frames when it triggers instead of one. So I used this setting at the beginning but it became pretty clear pretty quick that me watching the little timer light flash and knowing when to hit the smoke was tricky at best. Eventually I figured out that I had to put the camera in high speed shooting mode, which means it would just literally take pictures as long as I held the shutter button down, and hit the smoke at the same time. That meant I had to sort of stretch one arm out to the camera and my other arm was stretched out to the other side with the can of smoke and of course I should have had some video of me doing that but for some late-night reason, I just didn’t have the second camera rolling. I need an AI assistant that doesn’t suck to help me out with remembering the too many things I need to remember.
So I got a ton of shots with the smoke. I played with different shutter speeds and at first I was at like a quarter of a second but that blurs the smoke too much and makes it kind of really featureless and just more like an ambient haze. I wanted to sorta freeze some of the shape of the smoke, so to do that I ramped the shutter speed up to one 640th of a second to try to freeze the movement a little bit more. That meant I had to compensate exposure wise by pumping the ISO (which is basically gain, just digitally making the image brighter – that’s a very rudimentary summary of ISO), but the higher the ISO the more noise you introduce into the image, typically. But hey, we’re just having fun at this point, we’re just messing around, so we’re not gonna worry about it, we’re just doing tests.
Anyway, when I was shooting these frames here, I was gunning the smoke at a downward angle from up high and at the time I didn’t think I liked it, but seeing this column of smoke here in Lightroom now, it’s kinda interesting! It’s just kinda cool because it’s weird, it almost looks like a ray of light or something, or some kind special effect. I mean magical effect, ‘cause I guess it is a special effect.
Another thing I want to do in the future is play around with putting a monitor in the background so where all this dark background is could be like whatever image we want to put on the screen. I could put a stormy sky on the screen or a jungle background or something, it’s definitely something I want to try out. And as you can see I took a lot of shots. It was just fun to keep gunning the smoke and seeing what happened.
But at some point I kinda wanted the smoke to come up from behind the miniature instead of dropping down from the sky, so I repositioned the miniature on a chunk of terrain to get him up off the table surface and here’s another issue with shooting stuff yourself, you can’t see when you and your can of smoke is right in frame. You have to shoot a pic, then go take a look, go, ah, dammit, then take another guess as to where to put your hand and try again.
And finally I started to get what I was initially going for, which is the smoke boiling up behind but not filling the space in front of the figure. You can see how my starting the camera before hitting the smoke button allowed me to capture this bit and that’s what I couldn’t quite manage with the timer thing. And then just on a whim I put a piece green gel on the back light to see what that would do to the highlight color and the smoke itself. The green smoke is pretty trippy. But this shot here, right before the smoke swallows the mini, the green is too much but it is kinda cool, like you can see the green backlight on the figure and it kinda ties the mini into the scene more.
But yeah, once you have all these random shots that you have no idea if they’re working or not, you get to go through ‘em in some kind of photo app. And I’ll just be looking at the different smoke shapes and textures and how the smoke looks when it wraps around the figure and the cool thing is just how the organic nature of the whole process creates different results in every frame.
And of course photos can be color corrected and all kinds of things. Like here I just crushed the background to make the mini pop a bit more but then that kinda gets rid of the smoke effect. There’s literally an infinite number of tweaks and changes you can do while treating a photograph. But yeah, I like this pic and I like this one, I think there’s definitely a handful of interesting shots out of the 177 still images I captured.
So, the moral of this video is … sometimes you just gotta have fun and trip down the rabbit hole a little bit. Explore tangents, have fun with tests. Not everything has to align with a specific goal and more times than not, a goal might be born from the exploration itself. No matter what, any and all exploration results in experience points of some kind. And sometimes it’s just fun to do things for fun.
So, go do something on a whim. See where it takes you.
And report back with your findings.
See ya!