Model Railroad Blog

The Golden Hour

“In photography, “golden hour” refers to the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, when the sun is low on the horizon, producing a warm, soft light ideal for capturing stunning images.” Google AI

I bought my house 28 years ago. It’s surprising that it’s taken me almost three decades to realize my home is not oriented north-south. It’s skewed to the southwest. The end result of this being the sunset is perfectly framed in the center of the southwest window of the LAJ layout room. At the “golden hour” the room, and LAJ layout, are flooded with warm light. You couldn’t ask for better lighting.

This is one of several reasons behind my decision to gut the room and give it a total makeover. Details in an upcoming blog.

The Impala Publicity Shot v.2

My March 7 blog featured a model of one of the staged new car publicity shots that were so popular in the 1950s and 1960s complete with one of the ubiquitous Foster and Kleiser billboards. Although the billboards are clearly ads, there was some hard-to-define “something” that made them captivating. I decided to revisit the photo and alter it with two experiments.

First, I had another F&K billboard image that I really liked. My first inclination was to make a model of the second billboard and take another photo. That would be doable but a fair amount of work. I wondered if I could simply photoshop the other billboard into the image. To my surprise that worked pretty easily. (use Adobe’s “distort” tool to wrangle it around).

The second issue was cropping. Sacrificing compelling content for the good of the whole is tough, whether it be movie editing, book editing, photography, or model railroad design. In the original photo, I included the crossbucks to suggest the rail element. In a hard-to-describe way that was an overreach that detracted from the photo. In version 2, I cropped in tighter which highlighted the automobiles. The end result was a much better image.

Here’s the first photo showing the original billboard as well as the portion of the shot I cropped out.

Just A Typical Day

A nondescript boxcar sits silently under a palm tree near the Everett Avenue crossing in Los Angeles in the Don Draper/Mad Men era.

When I go out in the field to rail fan, I know going in that the odds are against actually catching a train. I’m fine with that and simply enjoy taking in the atmosphere of the rail scene as a whole. Scenes like this are what I’m used to and what comes to mind when I think of railroading.

When I put a shot together like this I focus on three areas:

  1. Keep the camera angle low. Through trial and error I’ve come to the conclusion that earlier iPhones with the single lens come closest to what the human eye actually sees. I bought a used iPhone 6 which I keep in my desk for photography.
  2. Make sure there are shadows to instill contrast. You’ll need a photo flood or natural sunlight.
  3. Photoshop out the layout wall or backdrop and crop in a photo of the actual sky.