Do you want to make beautiful photos of your works, but you don’t know how to photograph miniatures with your smartphone? You are in the right place! Today, in fact, I don’t want to bore you with difficult technical explanations that require cameras worth hundreds of dollars, but we will see together how to get excellent results by photographing your miniatures using your smartphone and without spending a fortune on equipment. In this way, you can enrich your Instagram account and enhance your works!
How to photograph miniatures with Smartphones
First let’s define what you’ll need:
- a tripod
- two lamps with the same bulb (choose two very bright)
- a blank A3 or A4 sheet
With this guide, what you will have to do is set up a small photographic studio, place the tripod in front of the desk and fix the sheet vertically, so that it creates a kind of scenographic with a white and curved background. Below you can see what I set up to take pictures of my miniatures.
But where do I get all the tools?
I assure you that with an expense of about 60$, you can create a small photographic studio that will help you make excellent photographs. Below you will find exactly the products that I use for my thumbnail photographs:
Tripod: TACKLIFE MLT01 – price: 20.97$
We have to photograph small objects with a smartphone of a few grams right? So why using expensive professional equipment? I had this tripod for a birthday present, I assure you that it does its duty for our purpose, at a ridiculous price.
You can get it here: Tripod Tacklife MLT01
Desk lamp Inspire – Price: 13.20$
You will need two of these, to ensure your miniatures is well illuminated from both sides. These are very simple desk lamps, handy and small enough for our purpose. And also cheap.
You can get them here: desk lamps
Led lightbulbs AmazonBasics A19 – Prezzo: 10.99$
Nothing could be simpler. Two bulbs with A19 socket (to be compatible with the two desk lamps) a little bright, these are 15W at 5000k. I recommend not to make a mistake on this, if you take those from 2700k the light will be too warm, tending to yellow, and if you exceed more than 5000k it will turn bluish by turning the colors of your photos on blue.
You can get them here: AmazonBasics lightbulbs A19
How to photograph miniatures
Now that you have everything you need (and for less than 60$!), Let’s see how to use all this to photograph your best miniatures:
Place the tripod in front of the desk so that the smartphone is in line or slightly above your miniature.
Finally, arrange the two lamps on the sides of the sheet so that they both illuminate the miniature at 45 °. The lighting must be uniform so be careful to place the light sources at regular and symmetrical distances.
At this point shoot! Adjust the brightness on your device. Below you can see an example of photography taken with a Samsung A8, not even a top of the range.
​What do you think about it? Try to make your photos like this and then let me know in a comment here, or on the Facebook page. Good photography can often make your job better!
You can find more photos of my miniatures on my Instagram account.
