Model truck photos outdoors

[rnagle]

A look behind the "Wizard of Oz curtain" at how I took the photos of Navajo P100 and a few other models, in addition to researching & building model trucks themselves I also enjoy trying to make them look convincing in photos. I'm not much "into" photoshopping completed images, I like trying to get the original image looking as real as possible. I like taking the photos outdoors when possible, this provides excellent lighting and good backgrounds.

There still has to be a realistic surface for the models to sit on, with trucks I use either an old piece of conveyor belting or a similar size piece of plywood (about 2-1/2' x 4') painted black. Blending transition from model surface smoothly into natural background can be challenging, I have found that using the work truck's roof rack can be quite effective. Being several feet off the ground gets everything above typical ground level clutter and closer to a natural horizon line.

Big as 1/25 trucks are they are still rather small compared to anything 1:1 scale. Photos of the Navajo Pete 352 taken along the railway line near home had a gondola car and some used rail in the background, these photos show where I parked in relation to the cars. This was a combination of "best guess" at what would look right and the layout of access road in relation to the cars and mid afternoon lighting:



A small aperture (f/40 is what I use as much as possible) requires correspondingly slow shutter speed, anywhere from 1/10 to 1/40 depending on lighting and ISO setting, so a tripod is essential. Pickup box is a handy place to set one up, I also use a remote control most of the time so I don't have to touch camera itself to click shutter, this eliminates one more possible source of movement that would result in a blurry image. Here you can see the tripod, conveyor belting "pavement" and of course, Navajo P100!


Image as taken:


I don't have Photoshop, I just use the "Microsoft Office Picture Manager" that came with Vista on my PC. Most of the time I will just crop the image if/as required, sometimes I will adjust "midtones" if the exposure was off a little. The cropped image that was posted:


I use a basic DSLR, Pentax K-r, and the lens supplied with camera. It has a range of 55 to 18 mm focal length, I keep it at 55 as much as possible as this permits me to use an aperture of f/40. For model photos I use manual exposure setting and often "bracket" exposures, one where the light meter says I should be and one f/stop above, one below.

[rnagle]

One photo of P100 was taken against a building wall, again this was close to home, here is where I parked for that one:


Being that far from building made the wall texture and relative building height look reasonably "in proportion", also I used a blank section of wall as background so items of known size such as doors and windows wouldn't contrast with size of models. Here is a lineup of some of the tractors I drove while at J&F:


The photo setup, here I used both the plywood and belting as "pavement" surface. Forced perspective was also employed as #111, lighter blue in colour and closest to building, is a 1/32 scale model:


Uncropped image:


That wall section was also a natural setting for Labatt's #90082 and trailer, to get sufficient foreground for this photo I placed plywood at an angle:


After cropping. Although I wasn't able to completely crop out roof details (I wanted to maintain proportions of image so I could print 4" x 6") they look OK as there isn't anything beside them of known size, again such as doors or windows, to indicate their true size:

[waylon1]

This is great, I do sorta the same thing with my 1/18 cars. Great tips, thanks a lot for a bunch of ideas.

[Deleted]

Thanks for positing this. It's very interesting, and a great lesson in photography.