Tuesday, May 19, 2009

A Crummy Photo


A couple of weeks ago I made the trip across town to my brother's house so as to shoot a bunch of photos for his new website ZZakk's Lab as well as various online discussions he might be involved in.
This caboose is the first one I worked on, and I liked it enough to show here before he even got a chance to use it.

It's G scale (Garden?) so it's the biggest size of model train you can't ride upon--around a foot long, I think.
Ken put working red and green LEDs in the marker lamp on the left side as well as interior lighting.
He added the chain (used for dragging stuff) as well as the leaf springs in the trucks.
And he scratch-built the grade crossing from wood.
Oh--and the roofwalk because he lost the original.

For my part, I used two flashes--umbrella'd main from the front/left and a splash of light from above on the background.
But the photo didn't really do it for me until I added an LED flashlight to the mix coming from far right--this opened up the shadowed end as well as throwing a shadow of the smokestack on the cupola and a bit of blue to the window frames.
Made all the difference for me--now it's a favorite.


Crummy is railroad slang for caboose.

1 comment:

KenKzak said...

A couple comments and corrections.
The track is 'G'guage, ie; 45mm, between the rails, but the scale is closer to 1/32. It started as [and still is really] a battery powered train molded in half a dozen clashing colors of plastic and then plastered with owner applied railroad stickers that make little or no sense. In short, it looked terrible when I got it.
The lights are actually 3V incandesent bulbs in the interior and marker lanterns.
I have some lettering somewhere that I'll logo it with when I find them.