Cheap and Easy Improvised Lighting Stage

Lighting stage setup #1

Raw camera result, no editing

For most people's needs, an expensive lighting stage setup is not necessary for model photography.

Here I'm using a cheap $20 rechargeable batwing LED light as a diffuse overhead light source, balanced on a pair of wooden bookends. The background is a texture I printed on my desktop printer — it's held in place by a pair of 3d-printed clamps, but it could be easily arranged and held in place against a book or something with a couple of binder clips.

In this first photo, the light is directly above the subjects, so there are some very dark shadows below. These could be mitigated with the use of a strategically placed reflector, but a simpler method is just to move the light a bit.

Raw camera result, no editing

Lighting stage setup #2

In this second photo I've just moved the light forward a bit, so it fills more of the lower areas of the models. They could still benefit from the use of a reflector, but the results are a lot better. 

You could tinker with the exact light position and height, and adding reflectors and what-not. You could swap in a textured or plain background sheet of your choice. Once you have the setup exactly to your liking, it's the work of a couple of minutes to get set up again, and you can photograph to your heart's content. 

Total cost of this setup was the twenty bucks or so I paid for the batwing LED torch, which has a multitude of uses aside from miniature photography. Everything else I had lying around, or could produce by my own efforts. The LEDs produce a very white light, close to daylight in wavelength, so there's little need for colour correction in the photo editing app of your choice (I use Affinity Photo).

The models are a pair of giants by Duncan Louca, printed in FDM on my elderly Creality Ender 3.