Photographing your layout

[rogerdB]

 My approach has always been to produce photos which are honest to my layout and not over manipulated in order to make it look better than it really is. I shoot using aperture priority. My camera remembers all the settings I use in that mode – aperture, white balance, manual focus and even the delayed shutter release mode, though I do sometimes use a wireless remote shutter release instead.

I use focus stacking even on shots of a single building. I've just bought Affinity Photo which does focus stacking very well and incredibly quickly. The program has much of the power of Photoshop at a fraction of the price.

Focus stacking seems to me to produce images which are more like what a photo of the real thing would look like. Chris M is right when he says that RM tend to use only a few shots in their stacks. Steve Flint told me that they hand edit the resulting stack rather than use any program to do it. I can sometimes see areas of their photos which aren't quite in focus although items slightly closer to or further from the camera are sharp. But their images do always look to me to be true to the model, more so than BRM and MR. I would never dream of adding loco exhaust!

I do often have to do some work on skies. The backscene on Wrenton isn't very high, so I sometimes run out of sky when using low camera angles. I always try to clone from what sky I have in order to extend it upwards. There have been a few shots, probably less than half a dozen, on the Wrenton thread where I couldn't achieve that and had to resort to adding in a real sky – but just a plain blue one.

Seeing the front edge of the baseboard can obviously destroy the illusion of reality so when there's just a small area of it visible I clone some extra grass to hide it. If there's a lot of edge showing I leave it in.

Shooting from the rear of the baseboard would show a row of wardrobe doors in the background. I made a board which can be stood along the front edge of the layout, painted it sky blue and stuck some scenic material to it to suggest a row of trees. I only put it in place when taking photos so something else to store when not in use!

Most locos and rolling stock seem to attract dust, often too small to be visible to the naked eye but quite noticeable in photos. Dusting everything with a soft brush doesn't always get rid of it so I retouch the photos. The flaws probably wouldn't be visible on the size of image I post here but I like to do it in case I get large prints made in the future.

And perhaps I should mention the most important element of taking photos of layouts. We're not really taking pictures of a model, but of the light reflected by it. So the light that we 'apply' to the layout is a major factor in producing good images. I like to be able to control from where the main light is coming, to get even lighting across the photographed area and to use soft fill-in lights to reduce contrast. Taking good pictures takes time and care, but then my primary hobby for some years was photography so having a subject always ready to pose for pictures is such a treat!

[ntpntpntp]

After all these years I still find I get the best photos of my layout using my old 2.1 megapixel  Olympus C2100 digital camera on manual, all the newer higher res digital pocket cameras I've had since have disappointed me.  One of these days I'll get around to investing in a decent modern DSLR or something.

I'm not a fan at all of adding artistic effects, though I must say there is a Japanese guy on the Facebook forum who creates lovely little scenes by blending in real life backgrounds etc.

[Train Waiting]

Just to prove that the camera does, (can), lie, looking at the last photo' from @njee20  the left hand leg of the layout looks, at least to my eyes, to be a horrendous incline  I think a Union Mills would struggle with that! (Can somebody please confirm that my eyesight is not getting worse and it does look like a steep incline - please?).

David, My eyes noticed something too, but I came to the conclusion that it an optical illusion due to the vehicles there being 'on the ballast' (I think) rather than a steep gradient.  Certainly, for what looks like a very realistic model of 'the Waverley', why have a steep gradient here?  But, maybe, my eyes are completely wonky!

Best wishes.

John

[silly moo]

One thing about taking photographs of your layout is that they often reveal faults that you haven't noticed before.

I take lots of photographs of each stage of the process while I'm building a layout, they come in useful if I need to remember which methods I used and can also be used for possible club newsletter articles.

[ntpntpntp]

Just to prove that the camera does, (can), lie, looking at the last photo' from @njee20  the left hand leg of the layout looks, at least to my eyes, to be a horrendous incline  I think a Union Mills would struggle with that! (Can somebody please confirm that my eyesight is not getting worse and it does look like a steep incline - please?).

Yes it does look like that, but that's surely just an optical illusion otherwise everything would be sliding down the slope      Presume it's just the camera lens going a bit fish-eye / goldfish bowl, accentuated by the right hand edge of the main board not being parallel to the edge of the board at the back?

[dannyboy]

I did realise it was an optical illusion, else those carriages would not be sitting there. I just wanted to make sure others could see it as well. 

[LASteve]

Thanks for all the feedback. I've been playing around over the last couple of days and found a few "truisms" that Roger mentioned - the height of the backscene usually needs some help extending the sky upwards, and the fascia at the front of the layout needs some disguising.

Here's a few things that I learned/was told, I'm sure you photographers will roll your eyes at the "stating the bleeding obvious", but here we go (I have a DSLR, a Canon EOS Rebel T6 with a 18-55 mm lens as standard. I also have a 70-300mm lens, but I'm leaving that alone right now).

• Use the lowest ISO possible (100 in my case)
• Set the resolution to the highest you can (my camera calls it "18M 5184x3456"
• Image format JPEG+RAW
• Aperture Priority with the smallest aperture you can support (f22 in my case)
• Least amount of zoom (18mm for me)
• No flash
• Use a tripod
• Set the white balance using 18-grey or white paper
• Use the self-timer

I've done some playing around with natural light on the layout, and the results are much better than I expected. I've ordered a couple of tripod lights and a full-sized tripod for the camera from Thames.com - sorry, RioGrande.com, I mean Amazon.com for the bargain price of zero (I cashed in some Amazon points) which should arrive over the weekend. I've got a mini tripod that I can place on the layout itself, but I'm finding that the exposure time for the settings above is between 5-10 seconds, so there's no way I can hold the camera steady for that long.

Next steps are to experiment with my photo edit software on my Chromebook to see if I can extend the sky upwards without it looking completely horrible (no matter what kind of shot I take, it shows the walls/bathroom door/closet doors so that's no good) and to make some generic removable scenery to hang over the fascia that's in shot.

Roger is spot-on with "stuff" your eye doesn't see but the camera certainly does - I've got bits of ballast all over the platforms, enough tumbleweed on the road outside the church to make you believe you're in Arizona, and people leaning at (unnatural, even for post-lunchtime pints at the pub) angles. The buildings don't look too bad, except for one Scalescenes terrace that I'll need to re-print and re-do to match up to the second one I made, with lessons learned from the first.

I've also found that the loco headcode/tail lights and any lights on the layout come out way too bright at those exposure times, so I think I'll play around with turning off the lights at some point during the exposure to dim them, but leave everything else alone.

I've got two scenic areas I need to finish, then I'll start taking pictures for real and see how we go. Thanks for all the help so far. I'm not sure I'm up to focus-stacking yet, I think I saw one of Roger's posts that said he does up to 28 shots for one finished image. This photography is fantastic, but so is the scenic quality of Wrenton. I think I should be "blur stacking" to distract the eye from some of my stuff 

[Bealman]

What code is that OO trackwork? Looks thick to me, like early Streamline.

[rogerdB]

• Use the lowest ISO possible (100 in my case)
• Set the resolution to the highest you can (my camera calls it "18M 5184x3456"
• Image format JPEG+RAW
• Aperture Priority with the smallest aperture you can support (f22 in my case)
• Least amount of zoom (18mm for me)
• No flash
• Use a tripod
• Set the white balance using 18-grey or white paper
• Use the self-timer

I'd certainly agree with the first two!

I shoot JPEG but after any initial image processing (usually stacking, of course) I save as TIFF to avoid any quality loss. When producing a pic for the forum I then resize (usually 1200px wide) and save as JPEG, normally aiming for a file size under 200KB.

Aperture priority good. I've never found the image quality that my main lens produces when stopped right down (f/22) is as good as when it's operating at f/8 or f/11. I think this would be the same for all but the very best lenses and was one reason why I decided to try stacking.

Not sure why using only the shortest focal length makes sense. I use the full range available on both of my lenses, choosing a setting which gives an image requiring the least amount of cropping.

Certainly don't use direct flash - using a brolly or bouncing it off a wall or ceiling might work but I've never tried.

Tripod essential.

I found one of the standard white balance settings on my camera was fine, but did try adjusting it up and down with no improvement.

Self timer - agree.