Preparing the photo backdrop

It's amazing what a model railway convention can do to stir the enthusiasm to get stuff done on a layout. Fresh back from last weekend's 2018 Modelling the Railways of Queensland Convention, I decided it was time to put aside work on my next book for a week or two, and get the photo backdrops organised for both Philden and the new beach extension. Part of this enthusiasm can be attributed to fellow modeller Anthony Veness, who I not only car-pooled with for the drive down to the convention from the Sunshine Coast, but who was also one of the presenters on the weekend with his small layout Dagun.

While I put the camera away for the convention to simply take it all in, those who were present can probably attest as to how well his backdrop turned out. In reality it involved nothing more than taking his image to Officeworks, and having it printed out on a B-Zero sized EZ-Tac adhesive poster that cost him no more than $38 Australian. So after returning from the convention, I checked out the poster sizes available on Officeworks' site (link here), to see what I could do for Philden.

I shot this image of Coffs Harbour Jetty when last on holiday in 2014.

The biggest limitation for a 9' foot long bookshelf layout is the poster length sizes that are available. I went through their panoramic sizes to find that the 762 mm x 305 mm size was the closest size available for the backdrop on my beach extension. The beach extension's removable 3 mm MDF board backdrop measures 750 mm x 230 mm, so will really require only minimal trimming. When last on holiday in Coffs Harbour, I took the standard tourist snap of The Jetty from the top of Mutton Bird Island while on a walk one morning. With the morning sun behind me, the photo captured the colours of the mountains and buildings with consistent enough lighting to consider using it as the backdrop to my fictitious harbour scene.

A reduced size image of the final area selected to print out as the backdrop for my beach extension.

The beach extension has only a small area of waterfront modelled at the front of the module, so to use the scene with the jetty included would place the station in the middle of the harbour and only look confusing. The key was to select which area I could use as distant scenery behind my beachside station. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0 to create a blank 762 mm x 305 mm image the same size that Officeworks would print out, and enlarged the photo until it filled the area. I then aligned the red bricked building in the left of the image with the 100 mm height of the highway overpass on my layout. When printed out, the image will need 70 mm trimmed off the top, along with 16.2 mm from the right hand side before I stick it in place. The bottom 10 mm of the image won't be visible once the backdrop slots into the channel that holds it in place. Any remaining unwanted foreground details will be obscured by the station platform anyway, or can be obscured with some strategic placing of some small shrubbery in the garden area behind the station.

Finally I auto-enhanced the image to the highest quality possible and saved it to a USB stick to take with me to Officeworks. The original 4.76 MB photo is now a 9.6 MB file. When viewed at actual size, there is a slight distance-haze to the outline of the buildings and trees, which should make for a great backdrop image as it's important to not make the background scene look sharper than your foreground modelling efforts. So if you wonder what looks so familiar about Phills Harbour in the future, the answer will be that it has Coffs Harbour as the backdrop! So far so good. I thought I'd got the more difficult image out of the way first!

We saw a whole lotta nothin' on our recent trip across outback NSW. This is the look I wanted for Philden.

During our recent trip to Victoria and back to visit Denise's Mother, on the way back home to Queensland, we diverted via Echuca, Hay, Rankins Springs and into West Wyalong before continuing north to our overnight stop at Dubbo. I wanted to see some wide open spaces on the edge of the outback. And between Hay and Rankins Springs that's exactly what we saw.

Denise took this photo in the middle of nowhere from the car window as we drove from Hay to Rankins Springs.

I've always wanted Philden to capture that flat, nothing to see as far as the horizon look. My plain blue sky has managed to portray a sense of that since June 2015, but three years on I felt it was time to emphasise it a little more. Strangely the shot I wanted to work with wasn't one of the many taken when we stopped beside the highway to photograph emus, but rather one taken from the window of a car travelling at 100 kph.

Not only did I discover that Officeworks don't have anything near a 1830 mm x 230 mm size option to print a backdrop, even on the closest size which was 1219 mm long, the foreground of the above photo looked horrible and blurred. I tried with countless photos that included emus, but in each case the emu would have printed out at a staggering 80 mm tall. That's taller than my railway station! The answer was to go with two 914 mm x 305 mm sized poster prints, and repeat the scene with a join in the middle.

This backdrop should really emphasise that Philden is located out west in the middle of nowhere!

What sounds and looks quite simple actually took me the best part of a day to complete. Okay, the latter part of said day was spent drinking wine on the balcony with my wife and commenting on how different my layout backdrop is going to look compared to our water view of the Pumicestone Passage, but I'm sure you get the point.

Creating a 914 mm x 305 mm blank file in Adobe PSE 8.0, I was able to nicely enlarge the original photo and crop the entire blurred bottom portion of the image altogether. I set the horizon level at the same height as the highway overpasses at each end of my layout, so that the horizon should only just be visible above the roof-line of my railway station. Finally I played around with the contrast and brightness until the reddish soil in the image was a good match for the dirt scatter I'd used on the layout. The tricky part was getting the horizons to match when placing two images side-by-side. It turned out I needed to rotate the image anti-clockwise by 0.6 mm to get it perfect.

I know it might be cheating to repeat the same image side by side over a six foot long span of layout backdrop, but if you've ever seen the far west of New South Wales, it all looks the same anyway. Miles of nothing! I then saved the image in the highest quality possible, and turned the original 3.4 MB photo into a whopping 16.1 MB panoramic image.

I made sure I kept an open mind when attending my first model railway convention, and simply took everything in. If you approach everything as a know-it-all, you ultimately never learn anything new. Instead I came away with a slightly clearer way of looking at the process of things. How different people do different things, to essentially arrive at the same conclusion. In my case, I'm sure others have found it easier to match their scenery to their backdrops, rather than try finding a backdrop for their scenery! I guess the proof will be in the pudding as they say. Tomorrow I'll drop by Officeworks with the USB containing my backdrop images, and two days later they should be ready to collect in time for me to install them this coming weekend.

What I'm most looking forward to about adding these backdrops to my layout, is hearing people at future model trains shows asking where I got my backdrops from. It'll be nice to say that my wife took the photo, and stand back to see their reaction! Until next time....

See also; Painting blue skies blue