Dwarf army photo

Right, so after the fight I had with trying to get a decent picture of my Empire, I found the Dwarfs a bit easier. Or maybe I have already just lowered my standards and stopped caring. Whatever. Either way it's a win, right?

So this is what I currently have ready to go for my Dwarf army. It translates to about 7000 points in 8th edition. There are number of incomplete elements that join the gang for games of Kings of War, like Elementals. I need to finish them. Anyway...

First a "sensible" picture that people might be able to look at without scrolling around...

Empire Army Photo

Looking back through some of my old posts, I discovered it had been quite a long time since I took a whole army photo of my Empire army. Actually, it seems that quite a lot of my armies are in need of a new family photo - some of them are missing a lot of units.

I decided it was time to go through and try to take up-to-date photos of each of my armies. Then, like 2 months after I decided this, I actually got around to doing something about it... And discovered that it's really, really difficult taking a photo like this. There are too many models, and even playing with a lot of settings on multiple cameras, I just couldn't get a crisp shot of everything. Of course, this problem will be most pronounced with my biggest armies. I probably shouldn't have started with the Empire. Oh well. Live and learn. If I actually discover something magical that can improve this, I'll come back and try again.

Anyway, here is about the best I could manage with the tools I had on hand. It's about 20,000 points of stuff in 8th edition. I stuck a number of random Empire Ogres around the place too, because they were essentially made to match the army and they are useless in their own right if all their friends are off pulling duty as unit fillers (which was always their primary function).

Another hop in the right direction

On the weekend, Tim and I decided to play a game of Warhammer. It was all a bit rushed, but on the evening before the game we both tried to work out what to use, and Tim (being the ultra-potent cheese-monger that he is) decided to use an all-Goblin list. Of course, this meant he was using my greenskins, and he expressed an interest in Night Goblin heroes on Giant Squigs (see, I told you he only liked the absolute best stuff). I didn't have any painted, but I had had a pair of them undercoated for months (or maybe years), and it was only 9:30pm... Sure, I can do that. 

Long story short, I got them to a usable standard by about 12:30am and went to bed. We played the battle on Saturday afternoon as planned (I took some photos, which I'll share later). Last night I decided I should probably take some photos of my newly painted models and share them here. But it seems I'm out of practice or something. I went to get the good camera, and discovered that both batteries were flat as a tack. Oh well, I guess the phone camera will do. 

Then I went to set up the lightbox...

 Well this is really helpful...

A less blurry Empire

The last time I took a whole army photo of my Empire, I was still trying to figure out how the new camera worked. Whilst I do not claim to have come close to mastering it yet, I do seem to be improving. Whilst I was doing something of an inventory (I'll talk more about that in a later post) I thought I would take the opportunity to have another attempt at some decent army shots.

Given how much these images really need to be blown up to be seen properly, I am putting them up at "original size". Apologies for what this will doubtless do to your beautiful browser window...

My entire Empire army as it currently stands.

Learning new angles

I haven't been making much hobby progress recently, but I do have something slightly different to report. Over the last couple of weeks I have taken possession of a tripod and remote for our DSLR camera. The hope is that with these additional tools, I will be better equipped to improve some of my photos. 

Specifically I am hoping to get better at taking wider angle shots - shots across the battlefield that take in more than a couple of units, and put more of them into focus. As far as I can tell, this means playing with something called "aperture". I don't truly understand how it works, but in practical terms it seems to mean spreading the camera's focus over objects at a range of depths. It also means leaving the shutter open for a really long time. When I crank the setting up to 32, the noise between the shutter opening and closing is something ridiculous like 20-30 seconds. As such, the tripod is obviously essential - nobody can hold a camera dead still for that long.

Anyway, I had a bit of a play with my new toys and thought I'd share my progress thus far.

This shot was taken at aperture 32. The 3 rows of models here are about a foot apart from each other. So although it's not the best shot, I've got things 24" apart more or less in focus. Given how enthusiastically the DSLR normally focuses on a small point to the exclusion of all else, this is a dramatic change.

Army photos have proven challenging with the new camera. Fiddling with aperture (32 again here) seems to help. Oh yeah, this is what all my painted Dwarfs look like at this point. Yay!

Breaking radio silence

OK, so it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. This can be attributed to a number of things, but the main two have been health issues at home, and the arrival of a long-anticipated computer game, Diablo 3. I am not one of those who was avidly reading every hint of news on the internet and drooling over each sneak preview, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been looking forward to playing it for years. As such, it managed to absorb most of my free time for about a week after it arrived on the shelves.

Diablo will undoubtedly continue to consume some of my spare time, however I haven't touched it in a week or so now (since I finished the game on Normal difficulty and have seen the whole story). This means I've actually had some time for hobby-related activities. Part of the time has been spent on the Wolfygryphs (some progress pictures are further down in the post), but I've been doing a number of things at the same time.

First up, I have been rearranging my workspace. I wanted to buy another half a dozen shelves to completely cover the wall and give me plenty of room to stash all of my paints, but IKEA let me down by no longer stocking the cheap and cheerful spice racks I used last time. This was very disheartening and somewhat unexpected, but I guess it's what you get for putting things off for close to a year. In the end I went for a completely different solution and bought some plastic drawers from Bunnings.

My modelling workspace, halfway through its re-arrangement