This scene was shot on the layout from 14th Avenue facing eastward down the tracks with my iPhone 6sPlus. Man that thing has a damn good camera on it when it comes to model photography. I also tried getting this shot using the iPhone13. As I moved the focal points, it kept jumping among the three lenses. I’m not sure if there’s a way to lock on just one lens or not? The figure was painted gray and placed fairly far back in the image. One challenge with a theme such as The Downtown Spur as there is very little variety in motive power. If you put a locomotive in the image, by and large, it’s going to be the same (or essentially the same) one in….every…..shot. That gets old pretty quickly. The solution is to simply take photos without locomotives in every one.
Sadly, not even Jesus, or Allah, or any other deity for that matter could save South Appliances, once located at 1395 22nd Street, NW in Miami. It went belly up sometime in ’07. Located adjacent to the Downtown Spur at the corner of 14th Avenue and 22nd Street two things made it unique. First was its height. Rising over thirty above the street it was the tallest structure in the area. Of more interest was its east facade.
At some point a rather motivated tagger emblazoned the entire east face of the upper story of the building with massive “Jesus Saves” graffiti. The lettering must have been twelve feet tall at least. Whenever you were rail fanning near the runaround, and looked westward, there it was, the huge sign on the horizon imploring all to reconsider their life path.
The model itself was a fairly straightforward project using the photo wallpaper technique. The only challenging aspect was the fact that I didn’t have that many decent pictures, and none existed on Streetview, so it took many hours of photoshop to create the veneers.
With no full image to work from, recreating the graffiti was a very time consuming exercise using the few letters I did have.
Standoff details include parts from Tichy, Rix, and scratch built piping. Almost a decade since placing the mockups of this structure on the layout, it was gratifying to consign them to the trash can and have the final model in place.
The eastern end of The Downtown Spur runs through a district of small produce related businesses. Especially in the mid-morning hours, you’ll see a hornet’s nest of forklifts buzzing in and out of them. Where you see produce companies you’ll find small business dealing in new and used pallets supplying them. Miguel Alvarez and Co. on 22nd Street was one of them.
My interest in railroading lies more in the rhythm and cadence of everyday existence than the overly dramatic. Part of that is the color and texture of weatherworn business that you walk by every day. When I composed this shot I wanted to see what I could do with lighting, especially as it hit the chain link fence in front. The photo was taken with my newly acquired, refurbished iPhone 6sPlus. I set a piece of quarter inch MDF on the layout surface to get the height that I wanted, took four shots, and combined them with Helicon Focus. Lighting was a single photo flood about four feet to my right and pointed downward at a forty-five degree angle. Finally, the sky was cropped in with Corel Knockout.
To create model photos that resemble what the human eye sees in the real world, we need a camera with a focal length and lens position that matches that of our eyes. The above photo was taken on my Downtown Spur layout using a recently purchased used iPhone 6sPlus.
We’ve all had the experience of being out and about, having something in our field of view catch our eye, and then photographing it. More times than not there is a bit of disappointment when the photograph somehow doesn’t capture what we saw. The optics of our camera aren’t the same as those of our eye.
It’s tricky enough with day to day photography but becomes a much larger challenge with model imagery. We build models to capture something in the real world we love looking at. How can we “look” at our work when we are such much bigger than our subject? The answer is in the camera lens but making it cave to our wishes can be challenging.
To rise to that challenge we need to address two issues. First is trying to get a focal length as close as possible to that of the human eye. A quick Google search turns up the following definition: “Lens focal length tells us the angle of view—how much of the scene will be captured—and the magnification—how large individual elements will be”. Keeping the Google screen open, we also learn that the focal length of the human eye is roughly 25mm. Good to know. Compare that to the typical SLR camera lens which is 50mm, pretty far from the 25mm of the eye. The effective focal length of an iPhone 6sPlus though is 29mm. Much closer. Problem one solved.
The second challenge is lens height. A typical adult railfan will be between five and six feet tall. When we stand rail side we’re always looking up at our subject…same when we watch YouTube rail fan videos. Unfortunately, SLR cameras are fairly large and, even when placed flat on a layout surface, the lens height is well over twelve scale feet above the rails. That’s way too high to be realistic. Even low angle shots taken with an SLR will look off, they’ll look much different than what we are used to seeing. Sometimes we’ll get lucky and have a case where we can drop an SLR below the fascia level but that can’t be counted on. Smart phones to the rescue again, at least the older ones. With the lens conveniently positioned at the lip of the device, we can get the camera low enough to get the angles we want, a scale four or five feet.
There is a caveat with the smartphones however, and that’s the move to the triple lens configuration with the newer models…great for general use, not so great for layout photography. I recently picked up an iPhone 13 with the newer three lens configuration. First, because there are now three lenses, we are back to being having a camera height that is too high again. Second, the algorithm gets confused when taking low angle shots and often jumps between lenses. The solution? It’s easy. Simply buy an older, refurbished iPhone with the single lens configuration. I picked one up for about a hundred bucks on ebay from an outfit called Upper Class Smartphones. It arrived in a week in perfect condition. (As a side note, having a second device is handy on a lot of levels which is something I never thought about.)
The Bottom Line:
We want model images that match what the human eye takes in while railfanning or watching videos. To do that we need:
1) A camera that has a focal length fairly close to that of the human eye and
2) A camera that allows the lens to be positioned very low and close to the layout surface, basically a scale five feet or so.
A refurbished, older iPhone, with a single lens configuration accomplishes both.
Having left the airport station, and crossed the Miami River, a northbound Tri-Rail train passes my recently completed Miami Jai-Alai fronton structure. Shot with Canon Rebel. Edited with Helicon Focus, Corel Knockout, and Adobe Photoshop.
