With practice and more experience with cameras, editors, and lighting I feel I can do a better job photographically than I did ten or fifteen years ago. I’ve gone back to re-shoot some of my older images. The one above is looking westward up N River Drive on The Downtown Spur layout.
One thing I’ll often take into account is which camera comes closest to representing what the human eye actually sees. Opinions on general photography sites don’t seem to match up to what applies to model photography. In my experience, the iPhone 6 comes closer than my Canon SLR or newer phone.
Filito Cafeteria ca. 2007 sits alongside the Spur where it crosses 12th Avenue. It shows up in a lot of images and was the ideal spot to re-hydrate with a cold juice on a scorching hot, humid Miami day.
The nature of rail fanning is such that a disproportionate number of shots are taken from just a few locations simply because they are more accessible. As a result, even the most mundane structures become stars in their own right simply because they seem to pop up in a ton of photos and videos.
Such is the case of Filito Cafeteria sitting alongside the Downtown Spur where it crosses 12th Avenue. Catty-corner across the intersection sat Trujillo and Sons, the Spur’s busiest customer back in the day. I’ve been putting off modeling it due to its complexity, especially the awnings. The day has come though….time to get to it.
I’ve started with the cinder block core. The awnings will then project off of that. There was quite a bit of photoshop work and measuring just to get to this point.(Note to self and other modelers. If you think there is even the slightest chance will model a structure, get ninety degree angle, full-on photos to work from. I didn’t, and it made my job much harder).
An aerial image from the early 2000’s
Facing north. The spur is behind the structure. Trujillo and Son’s is under the transit bridge on the right.
It’s been an adjustment going from being in mission mode/get layouts complete to slowing down and just puttering with small projects. At least for now, I’ll put plans for any future layouts on the back burner and fiddle with smaller projects on The Spur and LAJ layout.
A coral sunset unfolds as the golden hour ends in Miami on my East Rail 2 layout.
Almost two decades ago (October of 2007) , during the early years of my original East Rail layout, Vianney Roge visited from Paris with a few members of the RMB (Rails Miniatures de la Boucle) model railroad club. They presented me with this custom-painted car done by member JPG JPG. I always loved that car.
Over the years, as I photographed the old East Rail layout, there was one image I particularly liked. The RMB car was spotted in front of the Colmar Warehouse as a coral sunset unfolded in the back. For reasons I’m not clear about, I saved the image in a relatively small format. To make things worse, the original sunset photo, taken in Cocoa Beach, went missing. I spent hours going through old files trying to find it, all to no avail.
The original Coral Skies image was taken fifteen years ago.
I always thought that if I could grab a shot of a similarly colored sunset, I could re-create the original shot on East Rail 2. How hard could that be? Apparently, fairly hard! Thousands of sunsets since, and the stars never seemed to align. One thing I learned is that when you see a sunset you want to shoot, you’d better act and act fast. You have a surprisingly short window, measured in a few short minutes, to get the photo before it’s gone. I thought I had my quarry on a business trip to Nashville a few years ago, but in the few minutes it took to find an open area to shoot, the scene vaporized. Wednesday, while driving about in the evening, what appeared to be just a regular day with very few clouds, transformed into the shot I was looking for. I hit the gas, looked for an open parking lot and…..finally….. got it!
The new photo pulls together so many happy memories: the evolution of the original East Rail, the friendships, trips to Miami, and trips to Cocoa Beach, the site of the original (and now lost forever) sunset shot.
Master modeler SebSG’s Smallwood County layout is among the best of the best. One of his hallmark skills is clean, tight, and neat workmanship. It makes an enormous contribution to the visual impact of his scenes.
You can’t achieve exceptional modeling results without being crystal clear on the elements that drive those results. At the top of the list are:
-Composition
-Element Selection
-Material Selection
-Mastering Color (including contrast, sheen, and weathering patterns)
Those are the foundational elements of an excellent scene. There’s a fourth, though, and it’s one that doesn’t get much notice; perhaps people take it for granted. It’s basic neatness and clean workmanship, if you will. Some examples of a very long list include:
-Invisible joints and tight seams between parts
-No gaps in your streets and sidewalk joints
-No lifts or curls at your structure bases
-Everything is vertical and horizontal
-No errant globs of glue
-Perfectly horizontal decals with no film frosting
-Clean paint application
-Clean ballast application
-All parts are completely and tightly seated in position
-No fingerprints
To get this subject in hand a) you need to be aware of how important it is b) you have to care and c) you have to execute. The last one is the fly in the ointment. Make no mistake about it, neatness is a skill and one that takes decades to master, if one ever truly does. You start out with the touch of a blacksmith and, with focus, hope to move to more surgical skills. After five decades in the hobby it is one of my primary points of focus when I’m working.
Watching the crews over the past few op. sessions I could see how the operational fusees (Logic Rail Technologies) added realism without coming across too much like a gimmicky gameboard token. Since they played an integral role in the session, I went on the hunt for a cleaner, more streamlined on/off switch to trigger them. I came across these push-button toggles from Parts Express and really like them. The loco. pulls up just short of the intersection and stops. Hit the push button switch and the fusee lights. Do your work and hit the button again to set the fusee LED into its fade-out mode.
Here’s a view from below showing how everything is wired.
