Post Christmas FSA Present

Well Happy Christmas (or whatever alternative "winter" holiday you celebrate)!

I meant to post this up before, but of course this time of year is incredibly busy, so it had to wait until now.

What I've done is to create some alternative ship stat cards, specifically for printing in black and white (originally as an output source for Army Builder). Once done, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these more widely.

I know others have done alternative ship stat cards in the past, but they mess with the traditional order of ship stats and I prefer the "original" order. I also wanted to include MARs, not have too big a card and show weapons in a standard format. I like the idea of showing weapons where they are on the ship too.

So that's what I did. 139 times. So here's the full current ship list of stat cards in PDF format. Have a great holiday.

https://www.box.com/s/ruyifxplfcrsp0scwo6b

A few musings on model photography

So we had some old friends of the family to stay last weekend, and Ian has started his own photography business. He'd brought his (very expensive!) new Canon 5D, lenses, flash etc with him too to get some shots of Stonehenge while they were down.

This proved to be quite serendipitous, as the problems I'd encountered photographing my three-tone Dark Red/Red/Black Relthoza hadn't gone away. The weather has also been apalling the last couple of weeks (as anyone in the UK will testify), so getting good light for model photos hasn't been easy.

Anyway, Ian introduced me to Adobe Lightroom while he was down which, for those that don't know it, is a FABULOUS piece of software. The abilities it has for easy image handling, white balance, colour correction etc are immensly powerful, yet far easier to implement than a very intense program like Photoshop. He also introduced me to the website SLR lounge, which has a fantastic series of tutorials on Lightroom and many other things.

This got me thinking...I used to be an SLR guy, 35mm film, zoom & macro lenses etc, but gave up my old Ricoh for a Fujifilm bridge camera a fair few years back now. I currently have an S8100fd, which is a great piece of kit for those wanting a camera that can do a lot of different things quite easily. I hadn't appreciated, howver, just how much further things have progressed since the last time I lookd, nor how much prices have come down to get a decent entry-level DSLR. We're talking not much more than a decent "standard" digital camera.

So, I've taken the plunge and gone back into the SLR world. Going for a Pentax and various lenses (which my old macro, polarising & UV filters should fit), shooting in camera RAW format with a colour reference chart and then post-processing in Lightroom, and we'll see how we do for accurately capturing those Relthoza ships!