Well, it's not as dramatic as it sounds, but I've managed to get hold of a soft-lighting surround, a new camera stand and am using my shiny new Nikon D40 digital SLR camera that I'm still getting the hang of.

I've read a few of the articles on the web, and specific CoolMini, about photographing miniatures but was never very satisfied with the images I got with my previous camera (a Canon Digital Ixus 430), as despite acceptable results, they took a lot of setting up to get right, and several lights.  Repeating results took a long time, and a significant amount of setup time.

The Camera

The camera I'm using is the entry-level "bridge" Nikon D40 digital SLR.

I'm no camera-expert, so I won't try and go into meaningless detail about the camera, but I will say that it's an absolute piece of cake to use, effortlessly taking great photos using the range of "auto" settings, but it's also been easy to start using the more advanced manual PSAM modes.

Ken Rockwell wrote a great review in great detail, so check out his site.

The Rig

Now for the good bit.  Previously I either just used a 2-metre slab of MDF perched on my armchair near a 300W halogen standard-lamp and hoped for the best, or used a setup similar to that in the next image...

As you can see, it's quite a fiddly setup (that's the new camera though, I was using the Canon with this rig), due to several elements: 

• 
  
  Flourescent tube top-light - difficult to adjust as it's cheap and the hinge-screws don't hold well.  Takes a lot of space.
  
  


• 
  
  Halogen far-right light - wasn't always this far away, but it's a very intense, and very HOT light.  Don't want to be near this thing for any length of time.
  
  


• 
  
  Low-voltage flourescent bottom-light - this is fixed to the long-arm "tri-pod"* to provide an omni-directional light-source better than the Point-Of-View-Only flash on the little camera.
  
  


• 
  
  Obviously this needs setting up somewhere else which is cumbersome for transfering images, or has to be put away all the time so I can actually use the desk
  
  

Here's how it looks now:

 Obviously, a much neater configuration!  No external lights required at all, just the flash.  This means I can use a simple tripod and can leave the cube setup where it is.

Camera Setup

*warning* I'm a "real-camera" novice, so the settings I've used are a mix of using what I've read online, guess-work, and getting some info from more camera-literate relatives.  If any settings seem weird or uneccessary to you, let me know - there's a good chance I just made it up!

• 
  
  I'm using the "Aperature-priority" (A) mode on the PSAM dial, so that I can adjust the depth-of-field for the item I'm photographing.  Some of the figures are "deep" enough that I can't get the whole thing in focus otherwise, and sometimes I don't want to.
  
  


• 
  
  I have set the Exposure Compensation to -0.7 (which is -2/3EV), on the advice of Ken Rockwell as there seems to be a slight tendency to over-expose the images otherwise.
  
  


• 
  
  I cranked the Aperture to f/5.6
  
  


• 
  
  If firing the camera manually, I always use the self-timer set to about 2 seconds.  This is because the rig is quite dark, so you'll get blurry images otherwise
  
  


• 
  
  The flash is up so will fire.  (I have also had success with some models using "Rear Curtain Slow", this is also known as "Rear Curtain Sync", and essentially causes the camera to open the shutter as if taking a picture in darker environments, but then fires the flash just before closing the shutter.)
  
  

The Software

The thing that makes all this easier than any setup I've had before is that I now use the great Nikon software Camera Control Pro.  This application allows you to completely control your camera from the PC.

From here I can fiddle with the settings, take the photo and view the results, all from one little screen.  It automatically moves the image from the camera to the PC, and names it either sequentially or by date & time.

CCP also allows for automatic time-lapse photographs, so it should be possible to set it up pointing at the working surface of a decent painter, and get a "movie" of their process!  Set to perhaps 5-minutes interval should create some interesting results...

References

• Digital Photography School - Some interesting Flash information


• Ken Rockwell - camera review and tutorials

Using the fantastic SSL Explorer it is possible to access your computer(s) from anywhere, securely and without having to install lots of software on the machine you're using. All you need while you're out-and-about is a web-browser! There's even a free version , so you can get enterprise-grade SSL very economically.

Here's how I installed SSL Explorer 1.0.0 RC17 Community Edition on a Ubuntu 7.10 Virtual Machine...

First, go and check out 3SP's website, there's lots of great information on there. I chose to use the Community Edition for Linux, because I

1. Don't need any of the enterprise features (and don't have any money)


2. am running Linux

To reiterate - Go To Their Website ! There's an awesome SSL-Explorer Administrator's Guide there with full instructions for Windows, Linux, compiling, administration, etc.

Prerequisites

Much of this needs admin-level access, so get that first

sudo su -

You'll need the following packages to make this work:

• Ant [ant]


• The Sun Java JDK [sun-java5-jdk] - There is a java6 version, but I've not tried that yet

So first of all install those (a whole load of additional dependencies will probably be install too):

apt-get install ant sun-java5-jdk

At this point, it's probably a good idea to upgrade to the latest packages

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

Now download and extract the SSL Explorer source-code. You should probably get this from SourceForge instead of just copy'n'pasting my examples, so that you get the latest version.

cd /opt

wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sslexplorer/sslexplorer-0.2.15_01-src.tar.gz

tar xzvf sslexplorer-1.0.0_RC17-src.tar.gz

cd sslexplorer-1.0.0_RC17

Fixing some quirks

First make sure you're compiling against java 1.5 by running the following command and selecting option 3 "/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java"

update-alternatives --config java

Next we need to build and install:

ant install

You should end at some messages about connecting to the system to set it up

[java] Starting installation wizard.....Point your browser to http://testbox:28080

[java]

[java] Press CTRL+C or use the 'Shutdown' option from the web interface to leave the installation wizard.

[java] .

You should be able to connect to it's real IP address if it has one, or it's hostname, such as http://testbox:28080 in my case, or for example http://192.168.0.1:28080.

Configuring SSL Explorer

1. First create a new SSL certificate (or import your existing one if you have one)


2. Choose an authentication method - I used the built-in one.


3. Create an admin account. This will be used to create all the other roles and users


4. Configure the webserver however you like. Probably best to leave the defaults


5. Proxies, depends on your setup, mine I left off


6. I did not enable the Enterprise features, because I've already tried them all. I strongly recommend you do (they can just be turned off again later to revert to "free" mode) as there is some great stuff in there!

At the end, you exit the installer in the web browser, and your command-prompt should also return.

Make sure that SSL Explorer is running as a system service by issuing this command:

ant install-service

This should end with a bunch of [exec] commands, followed by:

BUILD SUCCESSFULL

Total time: 26 seconds

And the wrapper needs to be made executable

chmod a+x sslexplorer/install/platforms/linux/x86/wrapper

You can now start the service manually by issuing the following command:

/etc/init.d/sslexplorer start

Now you should be able to access your new server at https://192.168.0.1/ or whatever IP or name it has!

The Big Login Problem

For some people it won't work after a reboot. You won't be able to log in to the web-interface. That sucks, doesn't it? Nevermind, the solution follows. Apparently it's all to do with conflicting character encoding, which is beyond me, so just do what I did and follow in the footsteps of Greater People (who luckily are locatable on the 3sp forums - but search first! Everything I got stuck on was already answered)

sudo su -

cd /opt/sslexplorer-1.0.0_RC17/sslexplorer

vim conf/wrapper.conf

Edit this file, by finding the line

#wrapper.java.additional.1=

And changing it to

wrapper.java.additional.1=-Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8

wrapper.java.additional.2=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Also edit conf/system.properties and add the following line right at the end:

file.encoding=UTF-8

For some people the correct encoding appears to be "UTF-8" but if this doesn't work, try replacing that with ISO-8859-1.

Reboot and all should be fine. Incidentally, the wrapper.conf file is used when running as a service, and the system.properties when running manually. That's why you need to edit both, just in case ;)

Configuring SSL Explorer

This is a massive topic. Go and read the SSL-Explorer Administrator's Guide. No really, it's good.