Tips & Tricks for taken realistic looking photos of models?

[SONIC883_de]

N-Scale in 1964?

 

Not the best shot (scenery is missing).

Taken with iPhone 3GS/Camera+

 

Does anyone take realistic look photos of modeltrains and make them looking old?

What do you use? What is your tip to let a modeltrain looks realistic on a photo?

 

- Kai

[bill937ca]

Natural light is irreplaceable.  Usually this is accomplished by moving a module outside in the sunshine for the photo session.

[cteno4]

Kai,

 

helps getting light as bill said. it lets you close your aperture down to get more depth of field. low depth of field can be one thing that really makes a photo look like a model as when you take a normal train shot you usually have most of the stuff in view in a pretty good focus along with your focal plane. natural light is great, but not always the easiest to do with model trains unless your scene is portable. also need a good place with direct light if you want good shadows and also limits when you can do your shoot in the day!

 

also using some smaller fill lights that have some diffusers helps or even a small spot that will give you a sharper shadow line at just the right place in the picture to pop. it usually takes fiddling, i use to do some of this in our exhibit modeling photos as well as some product photos and its a real art of trying things to see what will make each scene pop. we use to even do cookalorises in front of the lights (little bits of odd shaped papers) to break the lighting up some so its not totally flooded with light (ie buildings and such blocking some of the direct light on part of the scene)

 

one thing is to try and get closer to outdoor color (temperature) lights. many indoor lights can be yellower or bluer than normal full spectrum sunlight. also playing with the color balance on your camera can help as the auto color balance can get thrown off and change the overall color of the shot. you can stick a white card down where you are focusing on with the lights on it and try to set your camera's color balance on that to help balance the color to the lights you are using. flashes are usually not great as they tend to give you hot spots that are hard to control and can wash out a small scene.

 

great thing with digital cameras is that you can try lots of things and see the results right away.

 

iphone camera probably isnt the greatest camera to be doing this sort of work. i think mac world recently had an article on taking good photos with the iphone (i think the photographer shot and edited the iphone on the mag cover completely on his iphone.)

 

sure there are lots of interesting ideas that will be posted here!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[KenS]

I just stumbled across this thread, which I must have missed when it was originally up, and thought I'd bring it back to life, since it seems to have died without many people commenting.

 

Photographing models on the layout is something I've spent a lot of time on, although I still don't have it foolproof. Natural light is best, for the reasons given above, but it's not practical for a permanent layout (and you don't want to put the layout near a window, as UV will quickly fade the paint on everything).

 

Lighting is the most important part of taking model photos. You need a lot of it, and you need the right "kind" of light too.  I've tried a number of different solutions. You could of course use special photographers lights (which is what magazines do for their pictures), but that's a cost the typical modeler isn't likely to want to invest.  My goal was to light my layout in such a way that I had enough "good" light for photography or working on the layout (older eyes need more light for detail work), without extra lights or very high cost.

 

I'll cut to the chase: my best solution is a high-CRI "cool white" fluourescent tube with a plastic diffuser.  I've written up my lighting design in case you want the details. The cost is about US$98 per four feet of layout, which isn't cheap, but is less expensive than many other options.

 

Warning: making your own lighting valence requires working safely with electrical currents that can kill you. If you aren't experienced with this: hire an electrician. It's not the same as working with layout wiring and 12V DC.

 

But before I got to this result, I tried a variety of methods over several years.  First, I used halogen spot lights.  These produced a warm (3100K) light, similar to that used for indoor photography lighting. But they produced very bright spots, and I didn't like the colors.  I switched away from those before I really had any scenery to speak of.

 

The first attached photo, "table-halogen.jpg", shows the bright spot effect (and the poor colors; those backdrops are blue, not gray). This was taken at ISO 800, f/5, 1/30-second with a 44mm focal length.  You can also see the shallow depth of field produced by the low-numbered f-stop. And ISO 800 was as high as my camera would go without serious noise (I use ISO 1600 more often than I like). The color is bad because the camera auto white-balanced to 3996K, when a more correct value would have been around 3200K. I know that because I adjusted the white balance until it looked "right" when post-processing.

 

Next I tried putting compact fluorescents that were rated for a specific color (although it wasn't clearly stated, I had reason to think it was 3,500K, sold as "bright white"; however the camera seems to have thought it was around 3800-3900K). The problem there was that while CFLs are better than older fluorescent tubes, if the CRI isn't stated, it's probably in the 70s (on a percent scale where 100 is best). This tended to produce yellow images when my camera auto white-balanced (perhaps because it wasn't exactly one of the colors it was expecting) with a faint greenish tint, which is a common problem with cheaper fluorescents.

 

The next image, "village-cfl.jpg", shows the effect of the CFL lights before post-processing. This actually had the train in motion, so I needed to up the shutter speed. I took it at ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/60-second with a 35mm focal length, and it still came out with motion blur from the slow shutter as well as a yellow tint (the camera auto white balanced to 4057K, when it should have been closer to 3800K).

 

I used these for years, but only because I had a good DSLR and could take the images in "RAW" mode and post-process to adjust the white balance and tint, which was a nuisance but workable.

 

As an example of why flash is bad, the next image ("village-flash.jpg") shows the same area, but using an on-camera flash to supplement the CFL lighting. Note how much brighter the nearer portion is. This one was at ISO 1600 and 1/60-second also, but adding the flash let me put the f-stop to f/11, giving much more depth-of-field. The lens was at 44mm focal length, so the framing is slightly different. But note how the color and brightness changes from the front (where flash dominates) to the back (where the room lighting, my CFLs, dominates). White balance was 5690K, due to the much bluer light of the flash.

 

For a final depth-of-field example, here's a statically posed photo taken fairly close up ("eh200-original.jpg"). Again ISO 1600 was used (you can see the noise in the speckling on the light-blue containers on the train), with f/5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/60. The lens was all the way out at 135mm, which also collapsed the depth of field a bit, but I wanted the "telephoto" look for this image (this is the original of one that was posted to my article on the DC modeler's site). More light for a higher f-stop would have provided more depth of field.

 

Two last photos show the change from CFL to high-CRI fluorescents. Image "subway-bridge-easti-original.jpg" shows my East-I train under CFL lighting.  This was taken at ISO 1600, f/9, 1/30-second, 100mm. Note how yellow the white styrofoam and the train are. The backdrop is a resonable shade of blue, although not quite correct. The gray track and bridge also looks tinted. The camera white balanced to 4106K here, where the correct value should have been around 3600K (it varies from the village scene due to a difference in the CFL lighting).

 

And finally, image "subway-bridge-series02-original.jpg" shows my Series 02 train crossing the same bridge, now lit by the fluorescent tube. This too was at ISO 1600, with 1/30-second shutter and the lens was at 105mm, but I could use f/11 thanks to the much brighter light. The depth of field still wasn't great (and this is where newer cameras that do high ISO better are really attractive). But the color was very good, with the camera auto white-balancing to 3924K and not exhibiting any tinting. It should be 4100K, so it's not still perfect, but it looks quite good even without adjustment.

 

I'm still going to end up doing post-processing even with the tubes, as the colors can be improved, but I could get away without doing it if I was in a hurry.

 

The most significant factor here was the high-CRI bulb, which was rated 85.  You can actually find fluorescents up to 92 these days, although not in all colors. Color was also important: I'm using a "cool white" bulb spec'd to provide 4100K light, which I've found a good value for "looks like daylight" without being too blue. The tubes (with the diffuser) also throw a more even light than individual CFLs do, and more of it despite using less power-per-foot (about half what my CFLs did).

 

And, by the way, those diffusers (translucent plastic covers over the lighting fixture) will remove what little UV a modern fluorescent bulb produces, so that's another benefit.

 

So that's my tip for good model photography indoors: get the light right.  If you have an expensive camera and can take raw, you can "fix it in post", but that's more work.  Good lighting doesn't need to cost much more than bad lighting, you just need to think about it a bit before spending the money.

 

The other is the the better the camera's sensor (i.e., the higher it can go on ISO without creating too much noise), the better the photos will look with a given light. You also need some kind of "aperture priority" mode, to let you choose the depth of field by choosing the f-stop.

 

And experiment. While I like 4100K, many modelers like "daylight" bulbs (5000K or higher) or more typical "indoor" lights (3500K or less).

 

What are your tips for good model photography?