Monday, April 6, 2009

What a difference light makes

I took these two pictures last Saturday. It is the very first tank I painted, an Israeli M-60 by QRF (I believe they have recently remade their casts for several of these items; this would definitely be a piece from the "previous generation.) This work was done about one year ago.
Painting tanks is a very unusual application for somebody like me, mostly used to work on horse & musket figures. Tanks are easy to prime and to paint with the base color, and not so easy to finish with proper tones and details. Anyway, as a first attempt, I was not too displeased; a few weeks after I finished the M-60, I completed three M-113 (you may see two of them in the background of the previous post's vignette) and they definitely showed my progress in getting comfortable with the different techniques of armor painting.
Fast forward one year: this past weekend I decided to take a few pictures, and I had to wrestle a bit to get good results from my camera. Light made all the difference, as shown in the two pictures. The first is taken with natural light in my dining room; the second one was the result of flash and higher speed. Just a few hours before, I had been a little disappointed by the very light blue I got on the uniforms of some of my Marlburian armies, as I mentioned here. I believe I have now learned a thing or two not just about painting tanks, but about photography as well.

1 comment:

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

Agreed about the light...

Which one of the two pictures do you prefer though??? :o)