Well there are two ways to go - high res digital camera (I love this way because you can immediately see and use your photos!) :-) New digital cameras are coming out so fast these days you can't keep up with them! So go get the highest resolution digital camera you can and get going!

or a regular camera - develop film/scann in at high res - then edit. 

Here's my take on digital cameras (a layman's guide to digital cameras written in everyday language -whoohoo!!) :-)

In short - get the best digital camera you can afford, be happy. Go home and take great pics of your minis - be happy some more :-)

Now here's the longer version :-)

As far as the camera goes they are making so many new ones it's hard to keep up - but go out there and get the one with the highest resolution that you can afford and call it a day :-)  most of these digital cameras have some sort of small card that stores the images (now these are pricey but think of it as all the film you'll ever ever ever use and suddenly it's a great buy :-)  anywho - the more storage on the card, the more images you can store. But remember it works like this, you can take like 200 small pics on a card, or a dozen super high detail pics :-)

  you'll also be getting two sets of rechargable batteries, and battery charger, a tripod (digital cameras don't tolerate shaking well). 

   umm - oh, you'll need a way to get the digital images from your camera to the computer. nowadays there are many different ways to do this - just ask the sales wonk what's newest and fastest, then ask the price - if it's too high proceed to the second best - repeat process until we have a winner :-)

    mine is an Olympus C-2500L and I wish everyone could have one :-)  it's fancier than I'll ever be fully able to understand, but I'll keep trying :-)

   the big secret to it all is that if you begin with a giant graphic that looks good the picture really stays pretty darn sharp when you resize it down a few notches (to the "big" web picture, then resize that down to the thumbnail (sharp image getting smaller so it stays pretty clear) and whammo you have your thumbnail - and you're done :-)

 I hope this helps you my friend! I think I'll copy this and post it in the "how I do graphics" part of my site :-)  maybe it'll help others as well :-)

 Glory to the Emperor and Sanguinius ~ Brother Edward
 
 

Making good minis is the hardest part of all this, but taking a good photo is another new challenge. By far the greatest issue you will face is one of lighting - lighting (in a word) blows... (sorry) different lights make different kind of light quite literally. I'll leave out the eight zillion things NOT to do, and I'll tell you what TO do :-)  first - get a floorlamp (the kind that shines light up on the ceiling) and put a nice warm "true color" lightbulb in there. Many places that sell lightbulbs these days have these "true light" or "natural light" kind of bulbs that seek to provide you with more "natural" light - use these every chance you get. If you do, the pics will come out looking pretty much the same color as you see with your eye - use regular lights and I'll bet your pics come out looking a bit bleached (bad light). And another thing - notice I mentioned the light should shine up on the ceiling? Yep - don't shine the light on your minis - that just makes freakishly harsh shadows and screws up your picture. So good light, shined away from your mini (up on the ceiling, or bounced off of a nearby wall will do just fine.  What else?

Background - I've found that having a nice background really helps an image a lot. Even if it's just a piece of black felt (which works great by the way) it makes the mini the central focus of the image (aka people aren't trying to figure out what other minis you have there in the background!) :-) 

Emotion - some minis are striking really dramatic poses - try to do something with that, is the guy coming at you? or is he about to assault someone else - try to imagine yoiu're making a movie and think of a fun camera shot that does your hero justice :-)

Camera angle - this is my single best discovery - shooting up at the minis makes it look like they are "lifesize", and makes the images really fun :-) Give it a shot sometime and see how you like it! :-)

Okay - now we have the images - what next?

   Well however big my original image is (different resolutions render different size images - I'm using a digital camera but you get the same thing when you scan your photos in if you go with that option) I then crop down to just the portion I'm most interested in - then I resize down to 600pixels on the longest side (as I save it I reduce the file quality to about 135k - Photoshop6 (and PhotoImpact 6) both have the handy ability to edit image quality so you can shrinkthe file size down to a nicer more web friendly size. Sure my graphics are still big, but they work alright for cablemodem users, and as the purpose of this site is to promote the raft of detailed modeling (as pertains to 40K) I figure the heavy graphics are worth it :-)

 Now - on with the show!

This 600pixel wide (or tall) image is now my "full" size image - then I make a 150 to 200pixel max dimension image which will be my thumbnail image - I put that one on my page - with an option for people to click on the image to access the "full" size image :-)

I hope this helps! 

also take a peek at this
http://www.dakkadakka.com/events.htm
they have many many photographs which may help you gain a feel for what kind of angles/lighting are better than others :-)

happy image making! ~ Brother Edward