This week I’ve been working on getting utility images for use around the blog pulled together.

I’m expecting to run the top bar with a random selection of fiction book shelves, games book shelves, general photography and any other interesting bits I can find that work well as long narrow strips.

Fiction Shelf Shots

Getting going on the fiction section of my library has dragged me into indexing the boxed books that make up the bulk of my library. This is a project that has been lurking around for some time but I have not gotten around to. Since the shelf photos involve pulling out many books in any case, adding in the indexing makes sense. However much sense it makes, it is also stretching the time frame for this work out by several times.

Lighting is working for me

I’ve got my lighting system together now (three diffused lighting stands). Not the highest end kit, but so far seems to do the job pretty well (with two up and running…in the office the third would leave little room for me).

Role playing games and wargames

My next step after the fiction shoot is to move a small book case into the dining room so that I can get the sight lines right and load it up with batches of my RPGs and wargames. This is going to take some photoshop stitching to get what I need as the one book case I have that accommodates the the height of these items is not very wide. Once I have the raw shots in hand, I’ll see what comes out the other end.

Smaller items

I bought pieces to try to build a light box for taking shots of smaller items. I expect to cut the foam core to make half a cube in bright white and set that up with the lighting in the back basement. I’m hoping that I can visually float items in this white space with appropriate lighting and get usable icons and other graphical pieces for the site.

Other light box options

There are other options on this front. I expect that I could soften the corners and edges of the box with some sort of light fabric scrim. I can certainly spray the inside with a coat of bright white paint (and over time this may be a good ‘refresh’ idea anyway as things get scuffed). I also picked up some ‘chroma-key green’ posterboard to play with as an overlay on the inside of the box. Being able to easily set transparency on the background would be helpful in some cases. All sorts of experimentation is possible…