Legacy Equipment
This lists some of the equipment we have used in the past to capture, digitise and convert images for the website. Please note that generally the text has not been edited so apologies for the present tense.
Canon EOS 300D
This was my Digital SLR which I used for many years, alas it was stolen recently, so has now been replaced by my Canon EOS 400D.
Sony Digital Still Camera DSC-P1
This is an oldermodel I use, this is a much more superior digital camera than the two HP models, with a 3.3 mega-pixel range and an excellent lense. The large capture area allows for a range of images to be taken and then cropped using image manipulation software. Here is an image taken with the Sony Camera.
I have since upgraded to the Sony P200 and more recently to the Sony DSC W35.
HP Photosmart C200
I did use one of these for a while but in the end, compared to the original Photosmart camera it was virtually useless for miniature photography, but was quite good for "normal" photography.
HP Photosmart Digital Camera
This was a cheap digital camera used in the main for speed. It was also my introduction to digital camers and it was pretty good for that. For example, I had access to the miniatures on a Sunday afternoon, it took five minutes to shoot all the models, and by the evening the photos were on the website.
Now compare that to "normal" film, whereby even using a 1 hour photoshop (and the problems with quality and cost) it would still be at least a few more hours and you would also need to finish the film. So for twelve pictures the digicam was the best option.
 Photograph from the HP PS Digicam. click to enlarge |
In miniature photography another advantage is a 1" focus, allowing us reasonable close-ups of miniatures; however as it comes without a LCD viewer and the viewfinder is useless for closeup work, it can be a bit hit and miss if I actually manage to frame the shot correctly. Of course the advantage of a digital camera is that you can take the photos again and again once I have downloaded the photos onto the PC, I can erase the photo memory card and start again. Another advantage is that I do not need to use a whole roll of film before "processing".
However there are some disadvantages, mainly quality, 640x480 pixels is fine for web work and 3"x2" photos, but any larger there is an unacceptable loss in quality.
The other main disadvantage for this particular camera is that it only works with Windows 95 and 98 and I have been using Windows XP for the last couple of years. The camera new, cost £250, today a camera of the same capability can be bought for as little as £20!
Film Cameras
Regardless of what you may have read elsewhere, film will always produce a better quality image than digital! Though with the release of the Canon EOS 300D things are now very close!
Film Speed
Most of the time I use Kodak Ultra Gold 400, or Fujicolour Superia 400. I have tried Kodak Royal Gold 200, but not sure if the extra cost is justified. The key really for good pictures for me, is good film and a good developer and processor, your "average" run of the mill high street or local store processor will not do your film justice. I generally use a professional film processor and at the same time ensure that my images are scanned onto CD (which saves a lot of time compared to scanning them in by hand.
Canon EOS 500
This 35mm SLR is perfect for my needs, allowing me a range of creative solutions whilst giving me the flexiblity of full manual control. Though the camera comes with a built-in flash, most of the miniatures' photographs are taken without it; the flash does appear to wash out the colours. As a result I use long exposure times which does slightly degrade image quality, but at an acceptable level. The EOS 500 was known as the EOS Kiss in the United States.
I do have a large professional flash gun which I use for weddings and the such like, and as it is rather flexible I sometimes use it with a large piece of white card to remove shadows.
Olympus OM101
This is my "old" camera and is now retired (and sold on eBay) after many years of good service. The main reason for retirement was the sever lack of attachments (ie flash or other lenses), resulting in having to rely on the 35-70mm lens that came with the camera. The other main problem was the "power focus" which had no advantages over a manual focus and was quite annoying to use. With the Olympus manual adapter I was able to take the kinds of shots I wanted, however, due to the lack of a flash, often indoor photographs would be blurred. It was after some thought that I decided to buy a new camera as a replacement, the Canon EOS 500.
Sony VAIO PCV RZ221
The PCV RZ221 desktop is a prime example of a well designed and equipped desktop. I like the fact it comes with two DVD drives (one a writeable drive), it has an in-built memory stick reader and a PCMCIA card slot! It has a Pentium 4 3.06GHz processor.
G5 PowerMac
The G5 Powermac, is a dual 2Ghz beastie with 1Gb Ram!
Older Computers
Prior to that I was using an Athlon 1333 Windows XP box with 256Mb Ram and a 80Gb HDD. My older box was a (wait for it) a P120 Windows 95 with 48Mb ram and a 3.2Gb HDD... It was not a bad piece of kit (SCSI card, Rainbow Runner, etc) but in the end was too slow for most things, especially using the internet...
Photosmart Scanner
This excellent piece of kit was used to get the photos onto the computer before being downloaded onto the website. We use to have a HP Scanjet IIIp which was used for OCR work, line art and anything bigger than 5"x7". The scanner can accept slides, negatives and small prints. However it is SCSI and our new XP box doesn't have a SCSI card in... therefore it's been retired to the garage.
HP replaced it with the S20 (looks the same, but runs off USB rather than SCSI), alas this is now no longer available.
Photosmart Printers
For printing purposes, you can take a 35mm negative and blow it up to 8"x10" without any problems. We have actually taken a "crop" of a 35mm neg and blown up to 8"x10", printed it off on our colour printer (a HP PhotoSmart one of course) and it was used within a magazine (Practical Wargamer) for one of our articles as a full page spread (in colour).
This was a really nice (but big and noisy) printer and in the end as it had stopped working was sent to the local rubbish tip... sad really!