Me and my shadow...!

[AndyThomas]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been doing some scanning recently. I got hold of an Annual for the first time a few weeks back so I thought I'd make use of my scanner and do my own scans, even though there are some available on other sites. What I've just noticed, as I was looking at them in 800 by 600 here at work, was the shadows on the back cover. Have a look at this:http://www.sfxb.co.uk/sfgfx/annualbackcover.jpgNow, look closely at the background to the fighters and Makara's ship. They've clearly been photographed very close to a dark blue piece of velvet or similar, obviously trying to simulate space. But someone's goofed, because the light source is so sharp that the models are casting shadows onto the material!We already knew that different sized models were used in shooting for different scales, but if you look at the distances of the shadows away from what's causing them it looks to me as if that cruiser model is probably the small one because one of the "close" fighters is casting quite a big shadow. I suppose equally, it could be that the fighter model up close is the biggest version and that's the normal close-up model for Makara's ship. The little group of fighters in the "distance" were probably used for the bigger battle scenes to give an impression of depth. What do people think? How many different sizes of the various ships do you think they used to give the impression of depth in the studio?