So I've been having a play with my photography over the last few days. My partner very kindly has given me her old Sony Alpha A450 and Sony SAL30M28 Alpha 30mm F2.8 Macro Lens. The camera and lens are around 5 years old, so not cutting edge tech, but it is a massive upgrade to what I've been using so far, my Nexus 5's camera.

The macro lens offers true 1:1 magnification to infinity, meaning I can get great detailed quality on the photos. If you view the photos themselves on their true scale you can see the amount of dust particles cover the miniatures, and the paint strokes start to become clear. On full-screen sized images these are barely noticeable and when looking at the miniature its almost impossible to notice any of these details.

So I don't need quite that image quality, but always best to have more than you need. Keeping these images at the correct size produces some stunning results. Along with the camera I have created a basic lightbox by sticking white sheets of A4 to the inside of a large Amazon box, then attaching a A3 sheet that bends from the back wall of the box to its floor. Having this curve means no hard lines of shadow are visible in photos, giving them the blank white appearance.

That is great for a nice simple plain look, but sometimes you want to make your miniatures look that bit more epic. In the photos here you can see I've printed off a free design found online with a basic printer, and it looks great! I'm looking at getting a high quality version printed out in A3 in the near future and matte laminated so that it doesn't get damaged. I just have to work out how and where I can get that done.

Hopefully soon I will get a proper lightbox and more daylight lamps and with a high quality background I should be able to start getting some great quality pictures. Once I've reached a quality I'm happy with I may look at photographing my whole army in the same way for a uniform way and create a dedicated page containing all the best photos of each unit.

For now, here's the new standard for future photography!