Miniature wargaming might be the single-nerdiest hobby I can think of. You have to memorize or reference a literal textbook worth of rules and assemble potentially hundreds of plastic models, and if you’re doing it right you’re also dedicating hours to painting this new force of miniature soldiers to look their best on the battlefield.

Once you have your forces assembled, you get to enjoy a 4-hour experience of rolling dice back and forth with a friend (or stranger) and pretending to decimate their warband through tactical skill or overwhelming firepower. Often diving into pedantic rules interactions and measuring real-world distances to make sure that you’re pretending “correctly.”

If you’re in the competitive circuit of players, you’re playing three or four games in a day, equating to 12 hours of mentally intensive “play” with only a lunch break to break up the day. At larger events, there can be up to 250 nerdy gamers battling it out for the ultimate miniature victory.

A Dark Eldar Voidraven Bomber I painted for a friend flies onto the battlefield, enjoying a target-rich environment.

It’s expensive, time-consuming, illogical, and profoundly silly. I absolutely love it.

It would seem only natural that I’d combine this weird, niche, and expensive hobby with my other niche, expensive, and technically challenging hobby: photography. I don’t mean with a phone - I mean with a camera and lens combination that makes my mortgage look like a joke.

I started shooting miniatures pretty quickly after jumping into the hobby of Warhammer 40k (a miniature war game). I found a club in the town where I live that held tournaments regularly and they allowed me to snap pictures of their games and ask questions as I learned the format and painted up an army for myself. It’s been a great way to make friends in the area and has allowed me to transfer years of sought-after game knowledge into my head faster than would be normally possible.

A Space Wolves Redemptor Dreadnought painted by Jonathan Palermo.

Two and a half years later I still don’t have a fully painted Black Templar army (my religiously traumatized space marine faction), but now I am actively playing in tournaments myself and slowly improving my scores on the leaderboard. In addition, I also take photos at nearly every tournament I go to and document the cool minis I see on display.

It often feels like I’m a miniature war photographer. However, instead of heading to distant battlefields to document the stories that define human connection or destruction, I am inventing conflicts and battles that demonstrate heroism or hilarity alongside artists and gamers who have spent hours carefully curating and perfecting their figurines for the fog of a fake war.

After a hero clears away a statistically unlikely number of enemy models, it’s only natural for me to grab a photo of the slain troops being pulled away to Tupperware triage areas. When a well-painted unit arrives from the shadows to outflank its opponent and deliver the killing blow, why wouldn’t I be on the sidelines to capture that moment? When victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat by an anomalous dice roll, who will be there to document the comeback story?

Me. I will be there. With way too much camera gear.

All of these stories happen through the lens of my Sony a7iii and a 90mm f/2.8 Macro lens. Photographers will know this is an expensive kit, and it might be total overkill for this subject matter. But I simply don’t care. To me, this equipment lends something totally different to tournament photos than what you might see on social media.

This is what someone might normally expect from macro photography by the way. This was taken in my backyard just after some rain.

It’s a style of photography that feels sort of like street art, but also product photography, and even portraiture. I try not to change or adjust the table environment in order to maintain the journalistic integrity (rather competitive legitimacy) of the battlefield. And rather than craft moments like you might in commercial photography, I get to react to these glacially-paced battles as they unfold, often monitoring 6 different engagements at once as I float between gaming tables.

I’m really thankful that I seem to have landed in the hotbed of miniature warzones called the Midwest. It seems that winters sequestered in basements lends itself to incredibly niche hobbies, and Warhammer 40K seems to have caught an audience here that I never even knew existed. And the people are just an absolute joy to talk to, exhibiting endless patience and gratitude for weird bespectacled photographers skulking around their gaming areas.

This silly hobby has been a fun one to pick up and make my own and I can’t wait to share more with you as I experiment with some more personal storytelling on this blog.