Lighting

I only work in artificial light. Lighting at this scale presents unique challenges—like creating a precisely calibrated soft spot a centimeter in diameter to give a bit of a highlight to the shoulder of a figure. In order to achieve lighting effects of any degree of sophistication, it requires lights designed for the purpose. Those do not exist.  

I worked for years with Lumecube lights. A fine product that is brilliant for many applications-- but which is not meant for miniatures. They are meant for larger, real-world scenes. They also have short battery life and tend to overheat. It could be quite maddening trying to get all the light sources to work at once, often only to have one or more die during an exposure. Balancing them was a tricky process of pressing buttons the right number of times to set a light level—then remembering the numbers of presses when they died and had to be allowed to cool down or be switched out. 

Therefore to meet these challenges I needed a new solution, and that solution is the lights pictured here. My good friend Steve Richard (Steverichard.com), a brilliant engineer as well as an extraordinary photographer, got interested in my difficulties and engineered and assembled a completely unique set of LED light sources, driven by a central power source and control box. Now I have stable illumination of even colour temperature that is designed to work at close quarters. It allows me to set precise light levels and have them remain fixed as I work with the scene, a complete game-changer for me.

The complexity of the lighting varies, but it is not unusual for me to use 5 or 6 light sources. Sometimes they are broadly diffused; sometimes the smallest, faint spot.  It is exceptionally difficult to work in a necessarily tiny space with so many lights. The stands are virtually on top of one another (and often competing for the camera’s line of view) and adjusting just one without jostling others is a major challenge. I employ the full panoply of techniques used for real world lighting –snoots, bounce, barn doors, diffusion, filters, etc. Because of the small scale some attachments, especially very long snoots, I wind up making myself. 

The central control box enables me to finely adjust all the light sources, then if necessary turn them all off with one switch and be able to start where I left off later on.  All the time lost working with LumeCubes is now avoided, and my attention is freed from worrying about lights to thinking of more consequential details for the image.