How to Photograph Your Models at little cost to you.Photography on the cheap. Lights,Camera,Action ! All of the pics that I have taken over the last five years or so and published in my photobucket ,

John, just a thank you for posting your thoughts and techniques.

Note: first a little of that boring text that I talked about !
Saving Picture References.

For those who may want to permanently  save pics or text ,what I have done in the past is just simply save it to my camera.Simply darken the room,set the camera on auto and use a little of the telescopic function to remove any distortion .The quality of the pic will suffer a bit but for our purposes here it will be sufficient. You could of course always save it to your computer the normal way.
Why bother ? you may want it for future reference and I often lose my pics on photobucket when I change anything.Example,whole albums can be lost if I change album names or when switching pics between albums.It is also easy to do and cheap and saves room on your computer.I have in the past copied whole books this way.
It is also sometimes nice to have a hard copy of an example of what you  are trying to do right there at your workbench.Sometimes changing them to B & W also helps to get away from all the color distraction as well,especially when looking for shapes and patterns.

Lest We Forget

Building your own facades or backdrops are really easy things to do using materials that are usually available to most of us.They are quite cheap to build and require only hand tools to make.

Glue,cardboard,tongue depressors , coffee stir sticks or small scale scale lumber is all you need.The core could be plywood ,cardboard or foamboard or whatever, as long as it is easy to cut,and does not warp with the use of water based materials like carpenters glue(white or yellow) and acrylic paint.

You will need a flat surface to work on and lots of #11 Xacto blades (changed on a regular basis) and your basic core material to start with.You will want to be able to easily change your design as you go along ,if you wish to.Save all cutouts from doors or windows etc... to use as perfect patches if required.I just usually tape any mistakes over using the patches,because these basic shapes only act as a easily worked flexible core for any brick or wood sheathing.The actual strength will be in the sheathing material you put on or your basic framing.

Before starting I will usually make a small scale complete structure,walls and roof etc ,using cardboard or thick paper.It doesn't have to be to any exact scale as it is only something that is used to stimulate your imagination or work out a final composition.If you want to build it to scale then that is OK too as you then will be able to take direct measurements for the scaled up version.

I will be using lots of pics to illustrate how I do things and as little text as possible ,I find long texts can be boring .

Well here goes ! I hope that you guys enjoy it.The thread will probably end up a little long so please just bypass it if you don't want to read it.Cheers ! John.

Here I have used a backyard facade as a backdrop for the locomotive that I am presently building.Just building a backdrop can be lots of fun and can be used for any modeling subject.

I was out shopping yesterday and was very impressed with all the various types of LED's now on the market.Because these lights run cool and most acrylic paint is transparent to varying degrees ,it may be worth experimenting a bit with creating mood lighting using a painted bulb technique.The only problem I can foresee is getting the paint to stick to the bulb permanently.
I will try experimenting with a transparent undercoat or maybe even a little fine sanding of the bulb itself and see what happens.
Man,if it works,I wish that I had this option ten years ago when lighting the inside of my structures.
The other option would be to borrow them back from the museum and re-wire them here at home using LED's, as I really would like to have them displayed as they were intended to be when I built them.

You know sometimes ignorance can serve you well in the end.Looking back now I realize that I would never have gone to all the trouble of using RR or old dollhouse lighting methods if I had known at the time that there were a lot easier ways of doing things.But I am convinced that LED's etc... just wouldn't have given me the same results.I would have lit my stuff for the museum and not for the camera, no question about it.It is a lot like film making once it is shot and in the can that's it.It is the image that is important not the diorama or movie set.It is all about capturing a moment in time.Things may constantly change but( for awhile )the camera has stopped time.Sure in time the image will get old and deteriorate and go the way of all things but for  a brief instant time appears to have stopped.Therein lies the magic !

In the spirit of "a picture is worth a thousand words"I have started a new album in my photobucket site titled "Lighting" for those interested in how easy it is to obtain different lighting effects when using my method for taking pictures.Remember all it takes is a hand held camera with a stabilized lens and set on auto , a hand held light with changeable bulbs and
most importantly your own individual creativity.Have fun !

Lighting my way.
I believe that if you want old style lighting that looks like old style lighting in miniature, then that is exactly what you must try to reproduce, old style lighting in a miniature setting.Yes wiring,bulbs and fixtures just like they used to be.For my own work I have gone far out of my way to try to reproduce that look even though  if as it turns out now it was only for my camera.My dioramas were never built for museum purposes although in the end it turned out that way.
I have always had a thing for creating moods or atmosphere using lighting ,I don't  know why but it has always been there for as long as I can remember.
About fifteen years ago when I first looked into the subject for lighting my first diorama I relied upon the RR guys at my hobby store for basic information so I used RR type locomotive headlights for bulbs.I had no idea about the doll house scene at that time and their much easier ways of doing things,so I came up with my own handmade wiring plan.It was a nightmare but suffice it to say I did get it working using a train transformer as a rheostat.
I never took many pics back then so I won't even bother trying to explain how it worked.

The next diorama was simplicity itself .I took two five watt Christmas lights for internal lighting and lit the rest from outside using my hand held ,handy dandy reading light to create a barn like type setting.(see pic)

The third diorama I went back to overhead lighting using fixtures,about 35 or so in all.Each one hand made using  Radio
Shack type wiring and doll house type bulbs this time but again using a train transformer which of course was overloaded so it had the nasty habit of turning all  the lights  out after about ten minutes.For my picture taking purposes I really didn't need them all on at once anyway.

The fourth diorama,an outdoor scene has no lighting at all so far although I am planning  a little lighting in the individual rooms behind the brick facade probably using LEDs.

For the most part I am happy with the way it turned out for my own  picture taking purposes, which is really why I did it this way in the first place.If I had used todays more modern ways of doing things I just don't think that it would have ended up looking the same somehow.

Spectacular work John. I can't get over the realism you are pulling out these dios.  Thank you for the help you are laying out there.  This is great teaching.   Rick.

Here is another little composition that was made up of different elements temporarily brought together.The Model T on the left is actually a diecast and the one on the right a plastic kit.
I enjoy doing relaxed poses where a lot of movement is not really expected.A driver catching a few rays of spring sunshine while waiting for the mail to arrive.The signs above the window gives us only a few hints about the storyline.
The open door into another room ,the corner,the car pointing inwards all help to add depth to the piece.The colors of green,red , gray and various earth tones harmonize well with each other.

The pic before this one is of the various parts required for one overhead light assembly.I had to make about 30 of them for this one diorama and wire them all together just for my own picture taking purposes.It will never be lit this way again.
I will however send a copy of the pics to the museum to show them how it was originally intended to look when I built it.

I took a series of pics of my 1/72 scale HMS Victory as it sits in a case in my home.These pics were taken in a darkened room through a plexiglass case using nothing more than my camera on auto,a flashlight on a stand and  a sheet of  kleenex for a filter.By playing with the light and camera angles I could get specific shots of areas of the ship that I could get no other way.Here is my fancy set up:

Smoky and dusty with filtered light,your typical 1920's workshop.The pin up girl is Mary Pickford,a Canadian girl that went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood.Under the other light is Harley the company mascot sitting in the cockpit of a Jenny Canuck biplane.The darkened area beyond could lead to another room or to an outside porch.
If I knew how to do it I would tone down the shiny hinge on the door as it attracts too much attention for my liking.This is another shot that I took when the diorama was under construction,there is an exterior wall where the camera is now positioned.I have again used the rooms corner and the open door and slanted window for increased depth.The lighting is again dollhouse with real bulbs screwed into in a modified Christmas bell type fixture.In this case out of focus is a good thing.The open window  set at an angle adds a little interest and suggests maybe a hot and humid summer evening..

Here is a fun shot through one of the windows.The lighting is dollhouse from fixtures in the rafters above.Unfortunately these shots will never be available again and were taken during construction of the larger diorama.The interior lighting will be impossible to maintain in a museum setting which is too bad but at least I have the pics.
This downshot uses the flooring to advantage for a 3D effect.There are a lot of square shapes in this piece so I took the pic at an angle to make it more interesting.I got lucky with the depth of field as my camera set this up automatically.Each pane of glass has its own reflective surface and is quite clear considering the problems usually involved when shooting through glass.It is high quality plexiglass with little or no distortion.

This is very unusual subject matter but interesting nonetheless.Even wreckage and junk can be interesting to look at.This pic was taken outdoors in natural light and converted to B&W.The title comes from an old pilots saying "any landing is a good landing as long as you can walk away from it".
I blurred the edges of the pic to concentrate the viewers attention on the cockpit area.It is an upshot of an upside down WW1 biplane fuselage with trees from my backyard in the background.The camera was hand held and set at auto with a little magnification.