Magister Knight, Plus Musings on Photography

"Where's his Rifle?"  "He doesn't have one."  "Oookay..."

I managed to paint up two Magister Knights (only one of them shown) for my small Military Orders collection. The only real idea I had for the colour scheme was to make green and white the main colours, and I kind of went on the fly from there. It's pretty apparent that I don't have enough colour on this model, but I was trying to get them done in time for our recent tournament, so I'm just taking it as a lesson learned. The Magisters are the poverty knights anyway, so my Teutonics can have more colour, and hopefully cleaner whites.

My limited experience thus far playing with Magisters tells me that outside of a Link Team, they're quite bad. This is ok, given that they only cost 27 points for a Heavy Infantry, but it's entirely possible that a Magister won't kill a single enemy model during a game. What they are nice for, is collecting points in a scenario. They're very durable for their cost, so put them wherever the scenario needs them, and don't worry about whether they will be fighting or not. I don't know if I would ever field a Magister in vanilla PanO, though.

I didn't photograph the other Magister because I dropped both of them while moving stuff around, and there's a pretty noticeable crack now on the base of the other one. This one also had a bit of paint chip on his sword, but since I just painted it silver anyway, it's no big deal. I was a lot less angry about the cracked Magister than I thought I would be, and I chalk that up to me not being that satisfied with how I painted it anyway, as well as there being 4 more Magisters.

Anyway, the photo is obviously overexposed in some areas, and some colours have been washed out. The model is also gloss varnished right now (there isn't a matte varnish I trust 100% at the moment) which I'm sure isn't helping matters.

I sometimes I get a nice, clear photo that is not only sharp and in focus, but that also captures the proper colours. The other 99% of the time though, I get a photo that is messed up in some way. And while I'm sure that my lighting, backgrounds, and maybe even camera aren't conducive to photography, the fact that I'm able to get that good photo once per hundred tries tells me that it is possible without a specific rig.

The other issue is, even if I wanted to fix my set up, I'm not exactly sure how. I have read up on how to make a lightbox and such, but since I'd need to go buy a bunch of stuff, that's a secondary concern for me. I've tried a bunch of things, including a white background (actually my worst photos, I'm guessing that only works in a lightbox), but haven't found something that works. I'll be trying some more photography soon, and will be posting up results.