Playing with toys

A couple doors down from my law office is one of those multipurpose comic book/figurines/warhammer/magic-the-gathering type shops. I casually call it the nerd store, and happily walk in occasionally to check in and see what's going on in there, because I too am a nerd. I like to gander at the comic books, buy some back issues of The Punisher occasionally, and I especially like their extensive collection of carefully painted tiny figurines.

They have, uh, alot of figurines. This image has not been cropped or altered in any way, its simply a test to see if Blogspot can digest a raw 10.1 megapixel image and how it will display that image.



Did I mention this is a large image?

Phil, the proprietor of the nerd store, said he wouldn't mind if I played with the figurines for awhile. The nerds use the figurines for some kind of roleplaying game, and each one rests on a disk roughly the size of a quarter, displaying various attributes such as speed, power, magic, or the ability to order more pizza late at night. Again experimenting with apeture settings, manual focus vs. autofocus, and just trying to learn the camera, I started snapping away.

There wasn't an abundance of light in the store so with the camera set to auto, the flash popped up and started fill-flashing everything to death. At first my play was pretty uninspired. This photo does show a bit of the scale of things, these figurines are very small.



I soon put the camera on manual flash override and tried my best to hold it as still as possible while taking my shots. I also tried to get as close as I could while still maintaining focus. Again I found that for this sort of thing the manual focus beat the autofocus, not for precision but for control. The autofocus on this camera always chooses the closest object which is nearest the center as its focus point, and that's not always what I want depending on the composition.

I'm very pleased that I got the focus on this shot right. Look how short the field of view is, Iron Man's face is in focus but his feet are not. We are talking about a distance of well under an inch.



In this shot Batman needs to be in focus, not the dusty plastic railing in front of him. Manual focus was the only way to go here.



I took the same image and manipulated it a bit with the software that came with the camera. I cropped it tighter, increased the contrast, and removed some of the color saturation, as well as sharpening it up. I was going for a "Dark Knight Returns" aesthetic, how do you think I did?



That's enough for now. Next time, Harley Davidsons!