Depth of field is generally tied to your lens type. You can extend your DoF by pulling back and zooming in.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

Afraid I'm no good at the technical issues - I only ever use the auto mode!

I guess you'd say I'm Practised, not skilled

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Cheers,
Paul "TuffSkull" T.
http://hobbybrush.com - My New Website, with thousands of painted Mini Pics :)
http://hobbybrush.blogspot.com - My Hobby Blog
TuffSkull's notepad- My Old Blog on Wargames Wiki.

Hi guys,

Had a little play with my compact camera last night. Below are two shots with the macro function.

These were taken at midnight, so only lighting available were bright kitchen bulbs, and the flash on the camera. There were lots of badass (technical term) shadows to contend with

Shot1, room lighting and flash.



Shot2, room lighting, flash and slight brightness adjustment in pixlr (thanks to someone in a different thread for mentioning this great tool!)



Let me know what you think, if these pics are suitable I'll carry on with my existing camera for model photos. Any C&C welcome, but please remember I'm a bit of a ludite with cameras and you may need to use lots of 1-syllable words....

Cheers
Reedar

Depth of field is regulated by the aperture/F-stop numbers. Essentially it depends on how large a "hole" the lens allows light through. The larger hole (low F. numbers) allows lots of light but also gives a narrow depth of field. A high F. number will give ensure that everything is in focus, but since you get a lot less light through the lens, you need longer exposure times.

The reason you are having issues with narrow depth of field is because your camera attempts to have as high shutter speed (low exposure time) as possible, to avoid shaky photos. This is even more true with macro photography, as macro pictures require even more light than normal.
If possible, you should set your camera i Aperture priority mode (Usually marked "A") and set a fairly high aperture value. You'd probably want to experiment a bit to see how much is needed. No real reason to set the value to max, as it only increases the exposure time, and personally I've found this to cause some weird issues when photographing metallic parts.
Anyway: The longer exposure time means that you will need a tripod to avoid shaky photos. If your camera allows is, a remote shutter release (or delayed shutter release) is also handy, since you risk shaking the camera, simply by pressing the shutter release button.

So, in short:
1) get a tripod
2) set the camera in Aperture priority mode and make sure you got the Macro function on
3) use a remote or delayed shutter release.

If your shooting a series of miniatures in one session, you could also use manual focus (if your camera allows it). This way there's no risk of the autofocus suddenly changing between photos.

Another way to allow increased depth of field is to up the ISO (film/sensor light sensitivity). This will allow you to set high depth of field with lower exposure times. However this also has the drawback that your images become grainy at higher values, so generally speaking I wouldn't make much use of it. Still, if youre having difficulty getting enough light, or if your insist of shooting handheld, this is a way to allow that more easily.

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Nobody expects the Inquisition!!!
http://theepiclounge.wordpress.com/

photo looks ok for a first run out of a camera for this kind of thing. I ran it through photoshop & did exactly what I do to my own pictures.

Main reason was to show what I see as the benefit of having a totally flat background to miniature photos. It takes away all detail from the background and allows you to focus (automatically / subconciously) on the miniature itself. Note grey works best (in my opinion) as too much white is hard to look at, where grey is easy on the eyes and nicely neutral for most colour schemes.

Again, it's a practised series of adjustments rather than being a photoshop wizard, but this has the advantage that I did it in about 40s....

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Cheers,
Paul "TuffSkull" T.
http://hobbybrush.com - My New Website, with thousands of painted Mini Pics :)
http://hobbybrush.blogspot.com - My Hobby Blog
TuffSkull's notepad- My Old Blog on Wargames Wiki.

Cheers Tuffskull. See what you mean about the background.

I'll have to have a play and see if I can work out how to do that....

Aside from that, were there any other 'adjustments' that you made?

Cheers

Do you want more stuff in focus, or less?

For more stuff in focus, take the picture from further away. Macro should work up to a foot away, if you don’t zoom in at all. For more stuff blurred, take the picture from as close as possible.