Photo Fun with the Wife (part I)

My wife's hobby is photography. She has a great eye, and she is passionate about good photography and photographers the way I am about the great illustration and illustrators of yesteryear (see my press Lost Art Books for more). I long ago gave up taking photos of anything on vacation when she and I are together. One only has to take a photo of the exact same point of interest enough times and see how superior your wife's turn out in terms of composition, dynamism, color, and "feel" before you realize it's best to leave such business in her far more capable hands.

She's not, however, a gamer, and I think she was a bit taken aback by my rekindled interest in a hobby that hadn't been part of my life for about three decades. I'm sure she didn't quite understand all of the time and energy I recently began devoting to the collecting of little lead men and beasts. But because she is a beautiful, supportive partner in all areas of life, she accepted this new hobby that was bringing me such obvious pleasure.

Working a demanding job in publishing as well as running my own press on the side leaves me precious little time for any hobby activities, let alone something as meticulous and time-consuming as painting miniatures. And even if time was no impediment, I'm not sure I would derive the same level of pleasure that others reap from that side of the hobby. (I do enjoy making and painting terrain for my miniature battlefields, but that's many orders of magnitude lower on the skills ladder as far as I'm concerned, and so my meager talents produce acceptable-to-me results.)

Since I have more money than time or talent for miniatures painting, I commission somebody to do my painting for me. I really like his work. He's affordable for my budget and, until a recent series of hand injuries, quite fast. I don't know how to describe the "standard" he paints to, but it's probably something like "really good tabletop," if that's a category. He only has one "standard" anyway, and it's pleasing to me, allowing me to fill my dining table battlefields and dungeons with lovely miniatures. Besides, this gentlemen has been a true mentor to me as I've tried to get my head around all sorts of aspects of this hobby, from which rule sets to start with to the history of various miniatures lines.

So...when my wife found opportunities to marry her passion for photography with my pleasure around miniatures gaming, I couldn't have been happier. She's the Second Saturday Scrum Club's unofficial "combat photographer," taking the pictures of our skirmishes that grace most of my blog posts. But what often doesn't make it onto the blog are the many photos from these sessions of the incidental bits of business on or around the play area in our dining room that capture her attention.  I try to include a few in my longer posts as grace notes interspersed throughout the dozens of photos I might post capturing and conveying the "action" or "plot" of a particular evening's game.

But she shoots a lot more than just the action. For example, Ellen may shoot some simple close up of colorful dice clumped in a forgotten part of table. Other times she'll zoom in on the unusual texture carved into a polyurethane castle wall, or the way the kitchen light filters through the tops of some fake flocked trees on the table. These photos provide a nice pause in what may sometimes seem like a deluge of clashing swords and spellcasting wizards.

I often refer to these as her "arty" photographs, not as a backhanded compliment, but because they're more about what piques her artistic curiosity. They're as much about light, color, shape, texture, and other abstract qualities as they are the little stories and adventures me and my pals are acting out with our byzantine rule sets and fistfuls of dice.

I've thought for a while now that I would like to include some posts spotlighting only these "incidental" arty photos. When a long-awaited new batch of painted miniatures arrived this weekend, I couldn't help but carefully unpack them all in the dining room. Ellen saw the growing array and took it as an opportunity to try out a new macro lens she had bought for her camera. We whiled away a pleasant hour or so together, me "oohing" and "ahhing" over each new evocative little sculpture, she plucking newly dabbed-in-paint miniatures out of the growing mass as they caught her eye, playing with the new toy attached to the end of her camera.

It was a lovely way to "play" together for an afternoon doing something we both love.

Trust me. I know...I'm a lucky sonuvabitch.

So, without more of my prattling, here is the first of a periodic series of postings devoted to Ellen's photos of my miniatures. I've broken this into three parts, and I'll post a new part every couple of days this week until they are all on the blog. Again, look at these in the spirit of her having fun trying out her new macro lens and seeing where the muse led her. Also note that these miniatures were never painted with the intention of photographing them at this extremity. That said, I hope you enjoy them a fraction as much as I enjoyed looking at them after she was done shooting. (As usual, click any to enlarge.)

• Part I (this post))
• Part II (Oct. 10)
• Part III (Oct. 12)

Here's a closing photograph I took of the dining room table as it filled with miniatures...

Again, look for parts II and III to be posted to the blog later in the coming week.

• Part I (this post))
• Part II (Oct. 10)
• Part III (Oct. 12)