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In search of realism...

James Hilton

Entry posted by James Hilton

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The wonderful thing about model railways is that it's a hobby with so many different areas to maintain your interest...

 

Take the garden railway in these photos, a totally different scale, with a totally different prototype - needing lots of research. Then there is the building of a layout and buildings, then modifying or building your stock. Throughout the whole experience there is photography.

 

Adjusting photographs to improve their realism is nothing new in the hobby. These days with multi mega pixel cameras and photo editing software features you can do miracles - however that doesn't get away from taking a good photo in the first place.

 

The big advantage (sorry no pun intended) of working with G-scale in the garden is that you always have natural light to play with, allowing faster shutter speeds and the ability to soften the background by zooming in to the subject.

 

All these photos were taken in colour - and were lovely - but by going monochrome it's removed the distractions and helps the eye even more naturally settle on the subject matter. Not only did I convert to monochrome but I have also adjusted the darkness, contrast and shadows using the standard editing features in iPhoto.

 

Once happy with the settings the next step to improving realism is careful and complementary cropping out of foreground blur or background distractions.

 

 

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I think the results speak for themselves - I'm really pleased with them - the only thing missing is some 'steam', but I don't find the smoke effect generated by the locomotives built in smoke generators particularly convincing so until I can do some photoshop trickery these examples will stand as they are...

 

As well as maintaining my external blog (http://ejklr.blogspot.com) for my garden railway project I also keep a 'photo' thread up to date on here from time to time (http://www.rmweb.co....cing-the-ejklr/).

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Mikkel
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Very nice indeed James. You prove very convincingly here that garden railways can be about realism too, and not just large-scale toy trains as some accuse them of being. The last shot is particularly convincing, I think - perhaps because of the way the chunkiness of the stock and building mix in with the detail/delicacy of the natural background. I also really like the composition of the shots - especially the first one.

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Will Vale

My vote is for #3 and #5 - fabulous mass of the loco in #5 in particular. I think it's amazing that the trees read as being in-scale, I wouldn't have thought that was possible!

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James Hilton

I am lucky with the line - it's at my parents home so the garden is big with lots of trees - most of it far enough away to just about be passable as 'in scale' (being blurred helps).

 

Would you believe it's only 12 months old!

 

The 'Rugen' tank pictured in 5 does have a lot of presence (it weights nearly 4kg too!), just a shame it's slightly out of focus, not something I spotted at the time. This was the best composition from this angle, the others either had the rear coach in focus and foreground very blurred or the numberplate in focus and the rest blurred. I haven't tried experimenting with photo stacking software - not sure there is a 'freeby' one available for the Mac?

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