WeeToySoldiers.com

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I wrote back to a longtime visitor (hey Jon!) earlier today. I thought I’d post here as an update and to explain the prolonged silence on the blogging front…

I’m doing fine, just going through a (long) stretch without anything worthwhile to add to the website. Been busy with the
family and spending what little spare time I have on outdoor photography for a change. Hopefully I’ll get that itch for the miniatures back soon and I can start posting again. Until then, I’m not going to push it and am just going to enjoy the break.

… well, at least it seemed like it!

I’ve decided to take down the guest galleries for the time being. It was turning out to be too much extra work that took away what little time I have to devote to the hobby and the website. Thank you all to those who contributed, I will be in touch individually.

It may come back in the future when I have a little bit more time and creativity to manage it better.

The following pages have been deleted, and their contents (only one under each) have been moved to the “Hobby Tips and Tools” page:

- Free Downloads: Color Gradient Files

- Good Ideas Gone Bad: Tamiya Flat Agent Shouldn’t Be Used By Itself!

I often get compliments on the photos on the website. Photography is a hobby I’ve enjoyed for a number of years, and I try my best to achieve the best results possible with the equipment I have.

However, often it seems people think that “great camera gear = great photos.” People, that is just not so. All it takes is a basic camera, a basic understanding of lighting, and a basic image editing program to achieve great results. Did you note the common theme in those ingredients? They are all basic stuff. Today I hope to illustrate how easy it is to achieve great results using a run-of-the-mill digital camera and a free image editor. If you have a digital camera in your possession, you are 9/10th of the way there to getting great photos.

Obviously, there are miniature hobbyists and painters out there who are also excellent photographers. This guide is for those who are not happy with their miniatures photography and would like to achieve better results. I certainly do not claim to be an expert in this area; but it seems that there are a lot of people who would benefit immensely by a simple-to-follow tutorial (that I hope this turns out to be!).

For this demonstration, I will be using my wife’s Sony S600 digital camera. It’s a no-frills, basic, six-megapixel camera that came out two years ago that’s geared for people who just want a fully automatic camera. It lacks some of the features I use regularly for the hobby photography such as aperture priority, full manual mode, true macro mode, custom white balance, etc. (don’t know what some or any of those terms mean? Don’t worry, you don’t need to!), but is perfect for demonstrating the feasibility of using a consumer digital camera to achieve great results.

Before you embark on your way to better photography, there are some prep work you need to do. First of all, you need to find out some very basic facts about your camera. Either the manual that came with the camera or the manufacturer’s website will have full technical specifications for your camera. The one you need the most is the macro mode minimum focusing distance. That is, how close the subject can be to the camera and have the camera still focus. Make a note of this figure.

While you’ve got the manual, it’s a good idea to make sure that you know how to perform the following functions on the camera:

Sounds simple? Well, judging from the photos posted everyday on various hobby discussion boards, it seems too many people skip reading the manual altogether, to their detriment!

For editing your photographs, if you don’t already have an image editor that you like/prefer, I highly recommend Picasa, published by Google (but available only for Windows 2000/XP/Vista, I’m afraid). It’s free and it doubles as an image manager (it creates a database of your images and thumbnails and makes it rather easy to manage your photos), and also has some handy image editing tools. A very nice feature of Picasa is that it never modifies your images as you edit them; it makes notes of what changes have been applied to what images in its own setting file, and thus your originals are never altered. Picasa lets you also save as JPGs the new versions of your originals, incorporating the changes you’ve applied to them. In this tutorial, I will be using Picasa to demonstrate various image editing tasks.

Right, so let’s assume you have an image editor on your computer already, or have downloaded and installed Picasa, and have the camera in front of you, and a number of miniatures you want to photograph. Let’s begin.

 

 

Here we have the setup. An even surface for the camera and the photo subject to sit on is a must. Most digital cameras have flat bottoms that you won’t need to do anything special to prop up the camera at an even level. For the subjects (miniatures), make sure that the background behind them is not distracting from the miniatures. Here I used a piece of paper curled and laid to sit against a rigid back support to achieve a blank backdrop.

My hobby room is lit by two 100-watt lamps pointing upwards to the white ceiling. When photographing, it’s absolutely essential to turn OFF the flash on the camera and make sure that the light shining on the miniatures is soft and indirect, not harsh direct light. How bright your lamps are, or how many you have, does not really matter, as you can adjust the settings on the camera to achieve proper exposure.

Here’s the Picasa software, in the image manager mode. To the left of the screen, you have the familiar Windows Explorer-type tree pane for navigating the contents of the hard drive. The right part shows the thumbnails of the images contained in the currently selected folder.

When you double-click on an image, Picasa instantaneously launches the Editor window:

Here you can view your image in greater detail, and also view the histogram (the distribution of light in your photo). To the left of the screen is the group of buttons that cover all the editing functions that Picasa has to offer.

“Crop” is for cutting out distracting, non-essential details from the photo. “Straighten” is for correcting out-of-alignment photos. “Redeye” — well, that won’t be necessary for the miniatures! “I’m Feeling Lucky” lets Picasa analyze and correct your photo the way it thinks it should be. I almost never use it, but sometimes it’s pretty good. “Auto Contrast” and “Auto Color” corrects, ah, contrast and color balances. I use “Auto Color” sometimes, “Auto Contrast” never, as I prefer more manual controls (available in the next tab, “Tuning”). “Fill Light” controls the brightness of the scene without blowing out the highlights.

 

 

All right, back to the miniatures. Here the miniatures have been arranged, and the camera — Sony S600 — is ready to take the picture. The LCD monitor on back of the camera makes it very easy to frame the scene:

Before taking the picture, I made sure of the following:

The S600 does not have a dedicated macro mode, but the manual tells me the minimum focusing distance is 12cm (c. 4.7 inches). The figures are well farther away than that, so all’s well.

Here’s the LCD screen of the S600 camera that shows the settings for the photo. It’s well worth to take a few minutes and discuss each setting I’ve marked with a red number.

1. White Balance Set to Tungsten.

White balance refers to the color temperature of the light sources. You’ll note that incandescent lights give off warm white color, while the flourescent bulbs are cooler. Daylight light bulbs to aid in painting give off different color light than others, as do LED lights, etc. White balance setting on the camera is your way of telling the camera what light sources are being used, so that the camera does not have to guess (which is what Automatic White Balance, or AWB), is. Most newer cameras do a bang-up job of guessing the color temperature of the light sources, but usually setting it to a specific white balance is more accurate. Some cameras lets you set custom white balance, for those truly tricky lighting situations, or if you just want more control over the photos. For a more wordy explanation, see my post here.

The admittedly underexposed image below shows the effects of white balance settings; on top, the camera tried to adjust the white balance automatically (AWB) and failed miserably. The same scene is at the bottom using the same camera, but with the white balance set properly.

2. Program (or Program Auto) Mode.

Most compact digital cameras have two auto modes: The Full Auto (usually a green rectangle with or without the word “Auto” in it), where the camera decides every single aspect of the picture making process (you simply point the camera at the subject and press the shutter), and Program Auto, which is not unlike the Full Auto but here you get to decide (and override) the camera on a few things, such as whether to fire the flash or not, what ISO sensitivity to use (more on this later), image quality, etc. Whenever possible, never use the Full Auto. You need to be able to set a few parameters yourself, despite your camera’s best intentions.

3. Timer.

Use timer whenever possible. With the camera sitting solidly on a flat surface, it may not seem necessary, but too often people jostle the camera as they press the shutter, resulting in blurred or less-than-sharp picture. Also, since you won’t be using the built-in flash and will be relying on ambient lighting, the shutter time is going to be far longer than what you can hand-hold without shaking the camera too much (and the resulting blur in your pictures). You can set the timer in a variation of 10 seconds, 2 seconds, and the newer custom (you set the length).

4. Resolution.

Most digital cameras are capable of capturing images in smaller resolution than the maximum possible. Always use the maximum resolution. Storage is cheap, and it’s easy to resize the images to smaller resolution on the computer later, but not the other way around.

5. JPG Quality.

All digital cameras let you determine the quality of the JPG images being saved (then there are digital SLRs and higher-end point-and-shoot cameras that can capture Raw images, but that’s not a subject for this article). Typically you have three settings — superfine, fine, standard, or some variation thereof. Setting it to higher compression results in smaller file sizes and thus you can store more images on your memory card, but I recommend against this. Always use the best quality (lowest compression, and thus biggest file sizes). Again, storage is cheap, and it’s always possible down the road to resize/reduce the image’s quality, if desired. Not the other way around.

6. ISO Setting.

ISO refers to the sensitivity of the sensor inside the camera that actually captures the image, to light. Without going into technical details here, suffice it to say that lower the ISO setting, better the image quality. Higher ISO settings come in handy when you are hand-holding the camera and can’t use the flash — for example, in a museum or a gallery or you don’t want to draw attention to yourself with the flash. So in such situations, achieving a proper exposure at the lowest (best image quality) ISO requires far longer than how long an average person can hold the camera without the handshake introducing blur to the image. Higher ISO makes the camera more sensitive to light, thus it requires shorter time to capture the scene with the available light. But the downside is that with heightened sensitivity comes increases sensor “noise” (interference, static, whathaveyou) and corresponding image degradation. With most compact digital cameras, ISO 400 or higher is not really usable. With miniatures photography using a tripod or resting the camera on a flat surface, the longer exposure time (also known as slower shutter speed) is not an issue, so it makes sense to use the lowest ISO setting giving the best image quality.

The image below shows the comparison between ISO 80 (the lowest on the Sony S600 camera), ISO 400, and ISO 1000 (highest on the S600):

… and the shutter speeds were, respectively, 1/8 second, 1/40 second, and 1/100 second.

7. Focus Area.

Self-explanatory, but make sure that you select focus mode that will achieve the focus you want. For example, if a figure is pointing a sword to his front, make sure you focus on the face, which presumably is in line with the rest of his body, rather than the sword tip, which most likely is in front of the figure and thus the rest of the figure will be out of focus.

Here’s an example: In the first picture, the camera has focused on the tip of the gun barrel of the Tau XV15 Stealth Suit figure, with the result that the rest of the body is quite blurred. In the second picture, the body is in focus, the gun barrel is a bit blurred, but the overall effect is more pleasing.

Of course, the best solution is to have the entire miniature in focus!

With compact digital cameras that lack aperture priority mode, this can be achieved by NOT using the macro mode and moving the camera away from the subject.

 

 

With all that preparation out of the way, let’s take some pictures.

CLICK! The shutter is released, and the first image is captured. Keeping in mind the golden rule of the digital photography (”everything looks good in the tiny 2.5″ LCD screen; download and review!”), I downloaded the image to the computer and opened up in Picasa.

The image is severly underexposed! The camera tried to calculate the proper exposure, but it was most likely fooled by the large amount of white in the backdrop. Hence the underexposure.

Now, at the bottom right corner of the Picasa screen, take a look at this spectacularly nifty feature (not of Picasa, but of general digital photography): Ladies and Gentlemen, meet histogram.

Histogram, simply put, shows you the distribution of light in the scene. Here’s how Canon describes it:

Some digital cameras lets you see histogram as you compose the image (aka live view), which is supremely neat. You can see how the exposure is going to be, and thus correct the problem (by changing the exposure compensation value) even before the first shot.

Still others shows you histogram right after the picture is taken, when you are reviewing the images on the camera’s screen. This is useful as well — although not as useful as the histogram in live view mentioned above — as you can usually retake the offending picture again right away.

Then there are cameras (such as the S600 that I’m using for this article) that do not show histogram anywhere, period. For those we need to download the images to the computer and view the histogram with the image editing program.

So, we need to retake the image, increasing the exposure compensation value to override what the camera thinks the proper exposure should be. After a number of tests, I finally achieved the result that I was happy with (I ended up increasing exposure compensation by +1.7, which is pretty significant):

… and the histogram:

It should be noted here that I could have corrected the original underexposed image by using Picasa’s editing tools. A couple of quick adjustments under the “Tuning” tab in the editing window…

… results in this!

Note the difference before and after, and the histogram before and after:

I still prefer to have the proper exposure captured in camera, as it’s always better to start the editing steps on the computer with images that are best possible quality. It’s easy to change and modify the original images, but you can’t add what wasn’t there in the first place.

You’ve probably noticed that the past few images all have pink-ish tint to them? What happened? This is the result of the camera’s custom balance not quite being up to the task of correctly analyzing the light sources. Some of the more advanced cameras have the setting where you can apply custom white balance values, but the S600 I used does not. So it’s back to Picasa to eliminate the pink tint.

Picasa has a command called “Auto Color,” which tries to render the image’s colors correctly. Usually it works well, although sometimes more user input is required.

Here’s the result of Auto Color command superimposed on the right half of the screen. Can you tell the difference?

It still needs a bit of help. So, going back to the “Tuning” tab, I use the “Neutral Color Picker” tool to properly achieve the white balance:

 

 

From here on, it’s mostly finishing touches.

If your image is not horizontally aligned, you can use Picasa’s “Straighten” tool to rotate it.

Picasa has a bevy of special effects you can apply to the image. Probably the most useful one of the bunch is “sharpen.”

When you’re all done tinkering with the image, it’s time to crop and export. Remember, all your editing so far in Picasa do not change the original image, they are stored in a special Picasa file that records the changes you’ve made. What we now need to do is make a copy of the original, applying those changes in the process.

Here’s the crop window…

… and the final image.

Press the “Export” button under the main editing window, and the “Export to Folder” dialogue pops up. Here you can select the destination on your hard drive, the name of the folder, whether to resize it down or keep the original size, and the quality of JPG. You can export multiple files at a time.

… and when the export process is complete, Windows Explorer opens at the destination folder, showing the contents.

And here’s the fruit of my labor:

Click on the image above to view larger version.

From here you can upload the image to any number of photo hosting sites and share your work!

 

 

[This section was added a day after the original article was posted — Ed.]

For those desiring to get close-up photos of their work, the key factor is to remember the minimum focusing distance for your camera in macro mode. Remember, the minimum focusing distance changes depending on the optical zoom setting — the distance is closer at the wider end of the zoom range, and much farther at the telephoto end.

The Sony S600 does not, as noted previously, have a dedicated macro mode, and the minimum focusing distance is around 12cm (just under 5 inches). I basically moved the camera close to the miniature, then moved it back a little bit at a time, trying to focus, until the focus lock was achieved. Here’s the Tau XV15 Stealth Suit at the closest focusing distance to the camera:

… which is a bit meaningless, really, until you look at the image at 100% crop. 100% crop is viewing the image at the pixel level. Typically, your monitor is set at 800, 1024, or 1280 pixels across. So when an image that’s wider than that is shown, the image viewing software resizes it down to fit the screen, so that you can take in the entire image at a glance, rather than having to scroll horizontally. 100% crop is viewing the image without any resizing.

Depending on how your browser’s configured, the image may “shrink-to-fit” your screen. Be sure to view it at 100% after it’s done loading to get the full effect. Alternatively you can right-click on the link, and choose “Save target as”/”Save link as”, and download it to your computer and view it with your favorite image viewer.

1207×1440 resolution image of the Tau XV15 Stealth Suit

… and here’s a cropped 100% section of the face/chest area:

 

 

Well, that’s it. Hopefully this tutorial has given you a better understanding of what’s involved in making great photos of your miniatures. I would, as always, appreciate any comments for constructive feedbacks. Thanks.

I’m very happy to announce a new feature to WeeToySoldiers.com website: Guest Galleries! Here visitors to the website can showcase their finished, in-progress, converted, or scale comparison photos. Please click on the “Guest Galleries” link under Pages to the right to see it.

If you would like to share your work with the WeeToySoldiers community, please send me a note via the e-mail link at the top of the page. I only have two requirements: 1. The content has to be family-friendly; 2. No passing off other’s hard work as your own, please.

Also, please keep in mind that the format of the Guest Galleries is a work in progress that’s just starting out, so it will change a lot in the months to come, based on feedbacks.

Thanks!

Let’s continue our discussion of some basic photography concepts. Since the miniatures hobby is so visual, and since my website is so image heavy, I figure it’s somewhat pertinent.

You’ve all probably seen pictures on various websites and forums, where images have heavy yellow or orange tints. That, my friend, is usually the result of using incorrect white balance value.

What is white balance? Here’s the explanation from Wikipedia:

… color balance (sometimes gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance) refers to the adjustment of the relative amounts of red, green, and blue primary colors in an image such that neutral colors are reproduced correctly.

Let’s think this through. All sources of light have different color temperatures, measured in kelvin. I won’t go into the theoretical explanation of color temperatures, of which I myself only have a tenuous understanding. Suffice it to say that different types of light sources — the sun, a fluorescent light bulb, halogen light, tungsten light, etc. — all give off different color temperature. Our brain can “interpret” the different sources on the fly without us being aware of it and render the colors correctly regardless of the source. So a red ball has the same color whether we look at it in the sun or indoors or under a light bulb.

Cameras do not have such luxury, and thus they have to guess. This is where AWB — automatic white balance — comes in. The camera analyzes the ambient lighting and tries to render and capture the scene with correct neutral colors. For the most part, the camera — especially the newer ones — do pretty good. You can take a look at the first image in the post immediately preceding this one to see the difference of four years and two generations of image processing chips make.

Most cameras also come with preset white balances for the instances where you want to have finer control over it. For example, white fluorescent light gives off a color temperature of just under 5,000 kelvins. When you set the camera’s white balance to fluorescent, then the camera will capture the image assuming that the available light is at right around 5,000 kelvins. If you accidentally choose the wrong white balance setting relative to the actual lighting condition (for example, you set fluorescent white balance for shooting outdoors in the sun), then the resulting images will have a color tint that’s very off. Please keep in mind that this is a vastly simplified explanation.

If you have a tricky lighting situation — such as multiple, disparate types of lights illuminating the scene to be captured — then this is where custom white balance comes in. Most digital cameras will have custom white balance option, where a user-supplied information can be saved as a white balance setting. Very basically, this is how it works. You use a white piece of paper or cloth and tell the camera, “this is white.” When the camera analyzes the scene, it notes the light reflecting off the white paper (or cloth) and notes the color temperature. But then it knows that despite the color temperature, this is supposed to be neutral white. So it applies a conversion factor to render the scene in neutral white, and stores that conversion factor and apply it to the future pictures. Obviously, this process needs to be re-run every time the light sources change.

The actual process of setting custom white balance differ from camera to camera and from brand to brand. With my Canon Digital Rebel SLR, you put the lens in manual focus and put a white piece of paper in the middle of the view. Take a picture (if not in manual focus, then the camera would try to focus and cameras really can’t focus on a piece of white paper — there’s no contrast for it to lock on and focus on). Then you drill down to the menu and tell the camera to use custom white balance based on this image.

Check out these images that illustrate my very wordy explanation hitherto!

The first picture shows the scene in automatic white balance (AWB). The camera’s confused — I used a mix of incandescent and daylight light bulbs to illuminate the scene.

I switched the white balance mode to tungsten. A little bit better, but the image has a decidedly pink tint:

So I took a picture of a white piece of paper (notice my thumb on the right holding the paper), and told the Digital Rebel to use this as my custom white balance setting.

Voilà! The white background is properly renderd, and from here I can now go on to make further image adjustments.

I hope you found this little article helpful to further better your own miniatures photography!

So I’ve said previously that I will keep using the Canon Digital Rebel (aka 300D) SLR as my studio camera. No, really, I will. After all, it’s still working just as well as it has been before I got the new Canon PowerShot G9 camera in my hands.

However, I’ve been playing around with the G9 and it’s hard to not draw comparisons. Poor Digital Rebel! After years and years of faithful service, it’s sterling characteristics are about to be impugned by the flashy new kid on the block.

One thing that I immediately noticed is how much better the G9 is at adjusting for white balance. All light sources have color temperatures, and digital cameras try to interpret different sources (sun light, cloudy overcast light, tungsten lamp, flourescent light, etc.) and render the scene in color-temperature neutral tone, as we see the scene with our eyes. Check out the following:

The Digital Rebel uses the original DiGic processor, released back in 2003, to compute various aspects of picture-making process, including determining the white balance. Set to Auto, the image has a very marked orange tint. If you set the camera’s white balance setting to the correct tungsten light, it still produces images with a pink tint. Using an external flash does get rid of the color tints, by the way.

In comparison, the G9 uses DiGiC III, released in 2007. What a difference! Even the Auto White Balance produces very good results, while the correct tungsten setting produces spot-on results.

Here’s the same scene from my Canon 30D digital SLR, which was released in 2006 and uses DiGiC II processor. Much better than the Digital Rebel, not nearly as good as the G9 (auto white balance on the left, tungsten on the right):

The G9 can, in macro mode, focus on objects as close as 1 cm (0.39 inch):

The Digital Rebel’s minimum focusing distance is dependent on the lens used. For the EF 35mm f/2 lens that I use for the vast majority of the studio work, the minimum focusing distance is 24cm (9.6 inches).

And then there’s the gorgeous 3″ LCD on back of the G9, which makes framing the pictures so much easier than getting down to the viewfinder eye level with the Digital Rebel.

Finally, the G9 continues to amaze me with its resolution and image quality. Here’s Reaper Miniatures Wood Elf King miniature, captured up close with the G9 in macro mode. First we have the entire image…

… with the red rectangle showing the 100% crop area:

… and here’s the full 12-megapixel image of the same picture:

4000×3000 resolution (12 megapixels) image of the Reaper Wood Elf King

Depending on how your browser’s configured, the image may “shrink-to-fit” your screen. Be sure to view it at 100% after it’s done loading to get the full effect. Alternatively you can right-click on the link, and choose “Save target as”/”Save link as”, and download it to your computer and view it with your favorite image viewer.

Impressive little camera!

Meet Canon PowerShot G9, my latest digital camera. For a compact camera, it’s pretty awesomely featured, amongst them RAW ability, hotshoe for external flash, optical image stabilization, etc. I don’t quite think it’ll replace the Digital Rebel as the studio camera for the website — for startes the Digital Rebel still works just fine and produces excellent images — but it was fun to check the new camera out with some macro shots.

This is a 100% crop (meaning the image was not resized or resampled) of a Tau XV15 Stealth Suit:

… taken with the G9, a one-second exposure at f/8 in macro mode, ISO set at 80.

Now, just for kicks, click below to see the full 12 megapixel image. Depending on how your browser’s configured, the image may “shrink-to-fit” your screen. Be sure to view it at 100% after it’s done loading to get the full effect. Alternatively you can right-click on the link, and choose “Save target as”/”Save link as”, and download it to your computer and view it with your favorite image viewer.

4000×3000 resolution (12 megapixels) image of the Tau XV15 Stealth Suit

Not too shabby, eh?

A common complaint with non-SLR digital cameras is that due to the small size of the image sensors, it’s difficult to achieve truly shallow field of depth (the areas in front of and behind the focus plane which are in sharp focus). Using the macro mode, it’s possible to achieve this effect, as can be seen in the three comparison shots below. The first was taken at f/2.8, the middle one at f/4.5, and the third one at f/8.0. Look not the miinature but at the stereo and the storage shelf behind the miniature to see the varying “blurredness.”

Fun stuff!

[Editor’s note: Here is part three of the ongoing series of some recent Hasslefree releases. For the complete review, click here (warning — image heavy, even by WeeToySoldiers.com standards!)
 

 

Today we have two small(er) figures from Hasslefree Miniatures. First up, we have Kurt in their excellent Grymm (space/sci-fi dwarves, for those who don’t know) range, and then we have a Reman figure, General Minimus.

Let’s start with Kurt, shall we?

Kurt (HFG064) is a Grymm light infantry figure, holding a grenade in one hand and a SMG in the other in a dynamic, about-to-throw pose:

Like other Grymm figures, he is packed with details and look very good, even without considering the fact that he is a dwarf-sized figure! I shouldn’t be surprised, really.

General Minimus is the only figure so far in the Remans range. He’s a halfling.

And a couple of angled shots:

… and finally, scale comparisons:

Click on the image to view larger version.

More to come in a few days!

For more information:

 

[Editor’s note: This review is a part of my ongoing series of some recent Hasslefree releases. For the complete review, click here (warning — image heavy, even by WeeToySoldiers.com standards!)
 

 

I have come up with a theory, backed up by absolutely no hard facts whatsoever, that Kevin White of Hasslefree Miniatures is actually not a human but a highly advanced visitor from outer space with intelligence and physical skills far beyond the mere mortal whims. How else can you explain the quality of the stuff he keeps on churning out…

[Editor’s note: After the review was posted, I was told by a visitor that the Jotun figure is actually sculpted by Seth Nash, not Kevin White. The Hasslefree site says so for Jotun (A), but not for (B), which is why I missed it. So, Seth, I’m sorry about the mistake, and you sculpted a kick-ass figure here.]

OK, I admit it, I have been rather free with superlative praises for the Hasslefree figures. But can you blame me? They’re gorgeous! They’re stupendous! They’re… OK, OK, I digress. Anyway. I thought I’ve seen good quality from them. Well, was I in for a surprise! Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Jotun (B).

Jotun (B) is, as the Hasslefree website laconically puts it, a “sci-fi zombie standing 46mm high with his legs slightly bent. His left hand is a gauntlet-covered clenched fist and his right arm is a flamethrower.” Pausing for a dramatic effect, the description goes on to admit that he’s “bit of a mean one here!” By the way, he is (B) because there’s an original Jotun (who does not seem to be encumbered with an (A) after his name), with different posture (same weapon choices).

Here’s the content of the Jotun (B) set:

Click on the image to view larger version.

As fans of converting and scratchbuilding will be no doubt pleased to note, the set comes with multitude of weapon configurations: There’s a chainsaw arm, a “normal” (as normal as possible on a sci-fi zombie cyborg!) arm, an arm piece that can hold three tentacles, a flamer arm, and a chaingun arm — enough to put a Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine Obliterator to shame!

Now, let’s meet and greet Jotun (B) to face. Here he is (yep he’s been primed). Please take a look at the gory and thoughtful details and tell me you’re not impressed!

… and his back:

Wowsers! Talk about details!

The following was taken with my favorite macro lens. Click on the picture below to see the larger version of Jotun (B)’s face:

Click on the image to view larger version.

 

The following seven pictures show Jotun (B) from various angles. Sorry, no overhead shots (as if there’s a pent-up demand for overhead shots of miniatures!)

Simply amazing.

 

The following three pictures show various scale comparisons.

Click on the image to view larger version.

Click on the image to view larger version.

Click on the image to view larger version.

My other Hasslefree reviews are going to be a bit anti-climatic after this one. Very impressive! I wonder if a Nurgle cultist Ogryn would look anything like him…

For more information: