Rather than scare people away with lots of information and technique, I decided to keep it easy and fun. Here are four easy lessons for taking better pictures of your layout.
The first lesson: control the light.
Don’t use on-camera flash. On-camera flash is for snap-shots. Pictures taken with on-camera flash are consistently bad: flat, washed out in the foreground and dark in the distance. Details all run together.
On-camera flash pictures are easy to take. And easy to throw away.
Shine the light –spotlight or flash--at an angle. When the light comes from the side, shadows are created. Shadows give texture. Features become distinct. Separated.
Hold the light near table level. Light coming in at a low angle gives a feeling of morning or evening that makes the scene much more attractive.
Don’t go all the way down to track level; shadows on the backdrop will result!
Don’t light the whole scene.
If you want to show off your yard full of rolling stock, the depot in the foreground and the town in the distance, you may be tempted to stand back and shoot the whole thing in one picture. Don’t. The result will be a jumble of helter-skelter shapes, all of the same size and brightness. The important items will be lost. Shine the light only on the important subject or subjects. The effect will be dramatic: similar to using a spotlight.
If you shine the spotlight only on the subjects you want to feature, then obviously you have eliminated the other stuff that doesn’t belong in the picture: the water heater, furnace, pipes, basement windows, and the edge of the layout.
A second lesson: take sharp pictures.
Insist on sharp focus. Most model layout photos are partly sharp. Everyone prefers shots that are sharp all over.
For sharp focus, use a wide angle lens. It will give a much better “depth of field” than the normal lens that came with the camera. “Depth of field” means that the depot, the yard and the distant town are all in sharp focus even if they are different distances from the camera.
For sharp focus, use the smallest lens opening. Depth of field is greatly improved at a setting of f16 compared to f2. Of course, at f16, the lens opening is quite small, and a longer exposure is necessary. Not to worry! That’s why you brought your tripod.
Always use a tripod. It will allow you to make time exposures. Long exposures are necessary with small lens openings, special filters, slow film, or for special effects. The tripod should be tall enough to hold the camera at eye level, since most layouts are about four feet above the floor. Most small tripods are only four feet tall. Not tall enough!
Use a cable release. It will allow you to hold the shutter open for those long exposures without jiggling the camera. Even with a tripod, it is hard to keep the camera steady while holding the button with your finger.
Third: Here’s the fun part: turn off the ceiling lights and use a handheld flashlight.
In the late 1950’s, O. Winston Link made dramatic photographs of Norfolk & Western steam action in Virginia and West Virginia. To control the illumination of the subject –which is always a challenge with black steam engines—he did his shooting at night, using flash bulbs the size of oranges and reflectors the size of washtubs. Today, many of his best shots are on display at the Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, and two books of his work have been published. His original prints sell for thousands of dollars on eBay.
In the Link portraits, the subjects are lit brilliantly, with darkness all around –a very dramatic effect! The effect is easier to get when photographing a scale model railroad and no less dramatic. Place some locomotives and rolling stock in a pleasing arrangement. Turn out the lights and shine a flashlight like a spotlight on each subject in turn. Hold the light several inches above track level and at an angle to the camera line-of-sight. Get in close, but make sure the camera cannot see you; you don’t want the light to be in the picture! If you can’t light up the entire subject, use the spotlight like a brush and paint the subject with light, moving back and forth for an even effect.
Focus the lens a little less than half way between the subjects. Set the lens opening on the largest f-number. Sixteen is good; twenty-two is better. Make a long exposure, with each subject lit for 5-10 seconds. Last of all, point the flashlight at the ceiling for 5-10 seconds to fill in the shadows. Ideally, the shadows should be barely lit. The result will be a well lit engine, depot, caboose, etc. surrounded by dark areas--a scene right out of Steam Steel And Stars or The Last Steam Railroad In America.
If you bounce the light off the ceiling for longer than 5-10 seconds, the night effect will be lost, but the whole layout will be well lit!
Adding some scale figures will improve the effect; Link always seemed to have people in his portraits. However, the only way to rival ol’ Winston himself is to add action to the scene. Most of Link’s steam subjects were hard at work when he clicked the shutter! -- How to do that with scale models is a subject for another day.
The fourth lesson is: take a variety of shots.
Take close-ups. Take some scenes. Take some engine roster shots. Take some overhead shots. Take some night shots. Take telephoto shots. Shots with no trains. Shots of yards full of cars; yards with no cars. Depots. Engines being serviced.
Finally, for layout shots that no one else has, try a nocturnal mood shot. Make your self a small light source using a battery, a tiny light bulb, and two pieces of wire. Use this light source to light up and photograph engines or other subjects. The single source of light will give the impression that you had an HO scale photographer down on the layout with a flashgun! --Naturally you will hide this light behind a boxcar or otherwise out of camera view. The light will be quite weak, so you will be making a time exposure of around ten seconds –with the lens opening at f16 for maximum depth of field.
The light will be amber in color because of the incandescent source. Use a blue filter on your lens if you want more accurate color. Or shoot without the filter; the amber light will give the scene a late night ambiance.
What About Digital?
If your digital camera can be set up to make long exposures with small lens openings and the automatic exposure devices turned off, you should be able to take successful layout pictures with your digital camera. Zoom the lens out to the wide-angle setting for best depth of field sharpness.
If you use a battery-powered flashlight for illuminating the subject, use the same light when setting your camera’s color balance.
If your digital camera doesn’t have the right features, you may want to consider retrofitting! Buy yourself an old 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) film camera, preferably one that does not use batteries to power the shutter. An old Pentax that accepts plentiful screw-mount lenses can be found on eBay for less than $50, normal lens included. A screw-mount 28mm lens will set you back another $25. Slide film is still plentiful. You will be making great pictures for about 50 cents each!
Macro lenses allow you to focus on close subjects. They are worth having for close-up shots of engines, etc. however they can be expensive.
Some zoom lenses have a built-in macro feature. If you already have a zoom lens, try it for layout shooting. If you are lens shopping, be sure to buy a macro zoom lens that zooms out for wide-angle shooting (where the depth of field is best). 28mm is good; 24mm is better.
Old-fashioned close-up lenses are designed to screw into the front of your normal lens for close focusing. They come in sets of three (allowing a range of magnification) are inexpensive, but sometimes cause blurring along the edges of the photograph, especially when used with wide-angle lenses.
Note that you really don’t need either of these devices if you are using a wide-angle lens! Short lenses usually focus in to about two feet, and at the smallest apertures, everything will be in sharp focus from twelve inches to twelve miles!