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

Review: Last Train poetry books

From the October 2018 edition of Australian Model Railway Magazine.

The October 2018 edition of Australian Model Railway Magazine featured a review on two very obscure, and quite possibly never-seen-before, books on railway bush poetry. If you're wondering who is responsible for trying to mash-up some traditional Aussie bush poetry with photographs of surviving relics from our railway past, then I'm going to own up. It was me.

  

The books in question are both self-produced, and I say that with a sense of pride as they feature my own photography, my own original poetry and were laid-out, edited, proofed, blocked and had the covers designed by me. The only thing I haven't done is handle my own distribution. I've set that up to be fully automated through Blurb.com. As for the lack of posts on this blog over the past month, that can be attributed to my working on the next instalment, the cover of which you can see above.

The review by AMRM was much appreciated. Overseeing a project such as this is time-consuming to say the least, and the next book to follow in the series is the result of my adventuring through the Southwest of Western Australia over the summer of 2017/2018. The costs alone in going out of my way to photograph abandoned railway stations and bridges on the other side of the country will ensure that the next Last Train book will never return a profit, given that a modest sales expectation for any kind of self-published poetry book would be no more than 100 copies. For a niche project such as this, no publisher was ever going to touch it. That makes getting a review on the book so important. So what were some of the kind words that editor James McInerney had to say?

"Some of the photos are visually quite stunning, capturing the atmosphere of the scenes with great artistic flair."

"...I enjoyed reading the poems and they certainly convey a very effective 'word picture' to go with the images." 

Although I've often reviewed other company's products and models on my blog, I could never bring myself to review my own work. So kudos to the kind words from James Mc.

While this may all seem like a bit of self-serving hoopla over something that anyone could do if they really wanted to, I've looked at the past few years of my writing and blogging about trains and model railways, in much the same way as an Actor or Actress taking time away from acting to work on another project. Eric Bana stepped away to film a documentary about his muscle car, and followed it up with some part-time rally driving. Come mid next year, I'll have a small body of railway books to look back on fondly in old age while sitting on my couch and sipping cups of tea. As for my next move? I feel I owe it to myself to finally have another crack at writing that blockbuster novel I've always dreamed of, (however long that takes). Hopefully in the years to come, these self-published railway books will all become an interesting 'before they were famous' story!

With October already in full swing, this weekend I'll be attending the 2018 Modelling the Railways of Queensland Convention. Following that, I'll be applying the new photo backdrop to Philden, getting some more work done on the Travel Centre for the beach extension and hopefully, (yes, hopefully) seeing the post man arrive with the 442 Class loco I'm waiting on. I suppose it's nice to always have something that you're waiting on. So from that point of view, I've added a 422 Class loco in Northern Rivers Railroad livery to the waiting list, (even though I did say I was done with pre-orders and adding anything more to my NSW layout). It seems there's always room for one more model train isn't there? Oh, and did I say I was about to start building a new layout? Thought so. But as usual, there never seems to be enough time. So I'll let that be a story for another day.

Stay tuned to this and my author blog at phillipoverton.blogspot.com as I'll have a big announcement to make regarding my books in May 2019.

My books can be purchased directly online through the following outlets

 

See also; Retiring a good series

Exhibition #7 Redlands 2018

The recent Redlands Model Railway Show was somewhat of a homecoming event for Denise and I to draw the curtains on a busy model train show season in south east Queensland. The 4th and final exhibition for Philden of 2018, saw us once more head south down the Bruce Highway with our country playlist blaring with everything from Morgan Evans to Kenny Chesney in the car. This time we continued south over the Gateway Bridge to an area that was once so familiar to us. The Redlands.

The calm before the crowds stormed in on Saturday morning.

Held in the Smith Street Hall in the bayside suburb of Cleveland, 2018 marked the 7th anniversary for the Redlands Model Railway Show. There was no model train show in the Redlands back when Denise and I were living in the nearby suburb of Capalaba a decade ago, so to be included in this year's show was special, in that it gave me the chance to bring my layout down to the shire I once called home. We also have family still living in Redlands, so the weekend also became a chance to catch up with Denise's brother and his family, and dine out on the Saturday night at an Indian restaurant at nearby Wellington Point.

The Lindfield station indicator board sign was a new addition for the Redlands Show to complete the presentation.

For once I was able to turn up early for the opening day, cashed-up and with a shopping list of what I wanted to buy. Normally the timing of exhibiting my layout at a model train show doesn't coincide with me necessarily being able to afford to buy anything whilst there, and the expense of taking my layout to a show, (especially if a couple of nights accommodation is required), only further eats away at what I can justify as 'hobby money'. Instead, I only added another pair of 20' foot side door containers to my roster from Don at Railco before the doors opened to the public.

From the opening 15 minutes on the Saturday morning, there was a constant stream of paying public marching through the door on account of it being a rainy weekend in Brisbane. So before it got too hectic, I walked the floor to take these few photos of some of the layouts on display over the weekend.

I was set up beside Clive Collin's Snap Shot layout. Each square was a different scene from around the world.

Turnpike Land, featuring London's underground, is still a crowd favourite on the south east Queensland circuit.

The Urangan Pier at Hervey Bay was across from my layout with its cool blue water...

...while Philden stood opposite with its scorching hot outback sunset lighting effects.

The view looking across the hall inside the Redlands Model Train Show as the doors opened on Saturday morning.

Inside the hall became quite crowded during the peak Saturday morning and afternoon periods, and Sunday turned out to be busier still, as the wet weather gave the locals something to do on a rainy day. There were still paying customers arriving at 2.30 pm on the Sunday afternoon. The organisers surely must have been very happy with the numbers over the two days.

Being positioned up on the stage gave me the best view of the venue, and a chance to watch what was going on down on the floor below. While it is inevitable that some of the 'old timers' will always succumb to some shut-eye at some point in the afternoon, a visit to the bathroom on the Saturday made me laugh when I recognised the sound of snoring coming from one of the cubicles. Some-one had fallen asleep on the toot-er!

The new extension once more doubled as hidden staging for the weekend, and while the layout and trains performed faultlessly, the inevitable finally caught up with me when I had two wagons take a dive off the layout onto the timber floor. The first occurred when I hurriedly steadied the layout after a young child tried avoiding being caught by her parents by running beneath the white safety chain to hide behind the curtains of my layout. With one hand on the layout and the other quickly cutting the power to the train that was running at the time, my own knee caught on the wiring that ran from my LED lighting, which in turn whip-lashed the cement hoppers that you can see in the photo above. While the NPRY bounced on its side with out damaging any of the walkways or ladders, I later stepped on a piece of the under frame detail that obviously came loose. The second was just one of those accidents when my wife had her jacket sleeve catch on the steel train as she reached in to throw a toggle switch. Turns out those NCNX wagons don't bounce so well as you can see in the photo below. I've already rebuilt this model once after it arrived in the post in worse condition, so I can easily rebuild it again. I'm just fortunate I found all the pieces.

Some minor post-show repairs waiting for me to see to.

Two exhibitor plaques in the space of two weeks! Now for a well-earned rest.

Philden safe back home once more after two model train shows in just two weeks!

So having just spent two full weekends only two weeks apart, running trains up and down my 9' foot long bookshelf layout, Sunday pack-up couldn't come quick enough. Despite it only taking just over half an hour to pack-up, load-up and be driving out of the car park, its the long drive back to the Sunshine Coast and the trek up and down the stairs from our beach-side apartment that is the most exhausting part of taking Philden on the road. Sure it's a great feeling of accomplishment when its all over, but after such a busy 2018, I've promised Denise that we will only take Philden to one exhibition next year. That now looks like being the Brisbane Model Train Show in May, which gives me 8 months to enjoy having my layout stay still long enough to complete it like I'd first envisioned.

Redlands marked the 7th exhibition that I have taken my layout to, and as you can see in the photos above, the exhibitor plaques have nicely accumulated along the front timber fascia of the layout. There's only room for 3 more plaques to be mounted on the front side, that only doing one show per year will take me through to 2021. By my own reasoning, that might just about do it for this layout.

What's wrong with this picture?

Another funny thing to occur from the Redlands Show, was that somewhere over the course of the weekend I screwed up my shopping list, and threw it in the bin. With my paid-for 442 class loco waiting only on word of its arrival, I took another look at what I had written down on my list, and decided that the pair of 20' foot side door containers I'd bought before the doors opened on Saturday was enough. As far as adding anything new to run on Philden goes.... I'm done. It's time to start planning a new layout.

As for what? Look closely in the picture above and you can probably work out what doesn't belong. And for that I can blame the Redlands Model Railway Show. It will go down as the place where I screwed up one shopping list, and ultimately replaced it with a bigger one! But as usual, I'll let that be a story for another day.

See also; Exhibition #6 Stafford 2018