Me (on the right, reaching over the board) playing Ascending Empires in Lautapelaamaan 2011. Photo courtesy of Antti Koskinen.

Another one, courtesy of Sampo Sikiö:

My photo (shown below) is currently in the lead in the March 2011 Picture of the Month contest! It’s a close race, though, as at the moment the next best photo  is just five votes behind (106–101). That other photo is by Mark Klassen, the current hall of fame #1 (fortunately he was third last month and thus has a 5-vote handicap against him).

The list has a bunch of great photos (Mark’s photo is very good). Check it out, and if you do like my picture, well, you know what to do =)

Here are some game photos from last weekend (session report here). Most of the photos are from Flickr, as not all can be uploaded to Geek. That’s a dilemma, there – take photos of popular games, well, Geek’s full of them already. Take photos of unpopular games, and nobody’s looking at them.

In any case a click on an image will get you to a bigger version.

7 Wonders

Finca

Dominion

Samarkand

I took some photos of Let’s Catch the Lion. It’s a tremendously cute game and well worth all the photos. I still haven’t really played it — I should start carrying it for our game meetings in case there’s a short two player opportunity — but thought I’d give it a go as a photoshoot object.

I’ve been thinking about lenses, so part of the motivation here was to try using 24 mm focal length on my zoom lens to see how that works, as one lens I’ve been thinking about is the Sigma 24 mm lens — perhaps that would be wide enough for capturing board views while sitting by the table, while still long enough to take nice close up photos.

The whole board shot, the lions and the photo with all the pieces are 24 mm photos, rest are 55 mm. It’s nice, but I think I’m still going to stick with the kit lens and the 50 mm lens for now, until I get a better idea of what I’m missing.

In any case, I’ve expanded my camera gear now with an external flash unit and — more importantly — a tripod (Monkeypod, a Gorillapod ripoff). That’ll come handy. I’m also working on a DIY lightbox, just to see what I can do with that.

Again, the photos are links to BGG, where you can find bigger versions and thumb them, if you like them. Still a long way to that Golden Image Uploader badge (I should photograph more popular games, probably).

Chick promotes to a chicken. Photo: Mikko Saari

The elephant and the giraffe move in four directions. Photo: Mikko Saari

The mighty lions move in every direction. Photo: Mikko Saari

All the pieces. Photo: Mikko Saari

The board set up for a game. Photo: Mikko Saari

MANIA! is a Finnish card game. It has bunch of cards and bunch of games. From the original description, I thought the cards would be almost a regular pack, but there are actually a lot more cards in various suits and colours. The rulebook lists seven different games, some variations from classics, some more innovative. I haven’t tried any, but it looks like something casual gamers might find entertaining. Nothing too adventurous, but not like the old stuff either.

Now shooting card game photos is always a bit of a challenge. In this case I decided not to try to fake some actual game play photos, so this shoot became more like a product photo challenge. I was trying to come up with something interesting that would show the viewer how the game looks like.

Again, click the pictures to see larger versions in BoardGameGeek (and thumb the photos there if you like them).

Let’s start with the box cover shot.

I thought the cards made a good background for the box. They also look manic enough. Creating a nice background of cards like that is surprisingly hard, covering all the gaps is difficult. There’s some table visible in the picture, but it’s not bad… A perfectionist could of course fix that in an image editor with couple of minutes’ editing.

Here are the four main characters in the game. This photo was actually taken before the previous one. I started by shooting just mixed cards, all face up, then came up with the idea of picking out the main characters, then decided to turn all the other cards face down to make the important cards stand out, then I decided to try the box on top of the cards…

Here the difficult thing was to get all four cards in focus. It’s not perfect, but this was the best I got in the limited time I had. The photo is somewhat cropped to make the important cards larger.

Here are face-up cards. These are just one suit, the pig character, so you can see the different styles even within one suit. This is a bit dark, now that I look at it, it could use some adjustment to make it slightly lighter.

As promised, here’s some photos. The game is somewhat obscure Muumien purnukkajahti, a Moomin-themed race game that won the Finnish Game of the Year award in the children’s game category. It’s a very boring roll-and-move game, the theme being the only good thing about it. Theme, and the nice wooden puzzle tiles that are used to build the track.

For larger versions, a click on the image should take you to BoardGameGeek (where you can also thumb the images if you like them, ahem). If you for some reason need even larger version (I limit the Geek photos at 2000 pixels), drop me a note.

Puzzle tiles from Muumien purnukkajahti. Photo: Mikko Saari

Race is on, yellow is in the lead. Photo: Mikko Saari

Both photos are taken on the same table, even though it looks different. First photo is with flash, the second without. These were the best shots in both categories (pile of tiles and game in play), even though I took photos of both with and without flash.

Without flash, the tiles looked cold and the flashless photos weren’t sharp enough. The game play photos, in the other hand, didn’t work out as well with flash. In the picture above, the colours are nice. I’m not sure about the depth of field — this was the best in the set, but I’m not completely satisfied. The blue pawn is in focus, but I wonder if the yellow pawn is too blurry.

Does somebody care about technical details? The first photo is taken with the basic EF-S 18-55 mm kit lens (43 mm, 1/60, f/5.0), the second with a 50 mm prime lens (1/60, f/2.0).

I’m working on the gaming year 2010 report (it’s a long one, this year, so don’t expect it any time soon), which brings me to 2011. I’ve got a goal set up for 2011: I’m finally going to get that Golden Image Uploader badge at BoardGameGeek.

Getting the badge requires 100 pictures, each with at least three thumbs. I’ve got something like 70 pictures that meet the criteria. So, not much… I could of course beg people to give my old photos some thumbs, but that would be the sucker’s way.

So, I’m going to shoot more photos and make them good enough to really earn the badge. I just got a new DSLR (Canon EOS 550D) and I’m in general going to learn to take better photos, so this is a bit of a subtask there. Board games have always been my favourite subject to photograph (kids being the other favourite), so it works out just fine.

Here’s my first go with the new camera:

Red wizard from the Magic Labyrinth.

I took a bunch of neat Magic Labyrinth photos with some fairly cool shallow depth of field, but unfortunately those photos had a chit on the board and it was just out of the focus, so they looked horrible. With the chit in focus, they’d been sweet. So, more shooting is necessary.

I’m also posting my game photos to Flickr. I’ll add them to a Board Game Photos set, so follow that if you’re interested in my progress. Comments from fellow photographers are most welcome.

Would you be interested in seeing photo entries in this blog? I suppose I could do that as well, if you’re interested.

I was photographed yesterday in the board game club:

Left is Hannu, right is me — we’re playing Le Truc. In the picture you can see my refined shuffling technique (and the beautiful wall decor of our board game dungeon; thank heavens the picture is in black-and-white).

As promised to Iain (see his blog), I present you the Funny Fisherman:

I posted some HelCon II pictures at my gallery.

There are also some pictures of Finstere Flure, Attika, Amun-Re, Age of Steam and Tigris & Euphrates, all taken at HelCon.