Pieces that Fit into a Picture

I was reading through my Facebook feed today and someone had posted a link to a blog post titled “No one is living the life they post on social media” and subtitled “It is merely a small piece that fits into a picture.”

Turns out that the post is mostly about the stress of parenting. I’m not a parent, but I continued reading. The overall takeaway was: People generally post only the best parts of their life to social media.*

This was not news to me, but the new thing that occurred to me at that moment was that the same is true of many layouts. I’m not just thinking Facebook (and blog posts), but the modeling press, as well.

I don’t know about you, but my favorite articles tend to be the layout spotlights. Now, there’s no question that a lot of the modeling that is showcased in these articles is top notch. It’s easy to look at the photos that accompany any given article and think to yourself, “That’s some great modeling. A perfect scene. I could never do that.” But many times, what you see on the page isn’t the whole story.

I love that Model Railroader highlights the photo locations on the accompanying track plan. (While I love Railroad Model Craftsman, they are sorely lacking there.) I will often flip back and forth many times between the pictures and the plan to get a feel for how everything goes together.

I’ve noticed this generally uncovers one of two things:

1. The photo spots are spread broadly around the layout
   or
2. The photos are taken in a cluster around one small area of the overall layout

What that means to me is:

1. That level of detail (and possibly quality) is focused in those spots and the “in-between” may not be up to snuff—it may even look like crap
   or
2. That one area of the layout looks amazing, but the rest of the layout may very well be “plywood Pacific”.

This is not universal, obviously. I’ve seen some large layouts where nearly everything was uniformly spectacular. But that’s the exception rather than the rule.

That’s because the camera is a magic box. The composition and framing of a photo allows the photographer to focus on the good parts and understate the not-so-good bits. The lead photo for this post is a good example. It’s taken from a section I built on the layout of my old club. I think it looks pretty good, although the depth of field is poor. It was taken to document progress on that section and I was satisfied with the quality of what was there. “What was there” being the operative term.

Let me show you behind the curtain and share some photos from other angles. They show that there was some creative camera placement and that there was still a lot of work to be done.

Let’s talk about what the lead photo hides:

• This part of the layout was right next to the room entrance, so there was molding right behind the building flats
• The “asphalt” in the center of the track for the street trackage is not installed. The Fanta truck is strategically positioned so as to hide the worst of it; the camera angle is very low so you look “over” the missing bits
• The photo is cropped in such a way that you can’t see the reflection from the iPhone camera flash in the windows
• The streets don’t have center lines, stop lines, crosswalks, or any kind of cracks to provide a higher level of realism.
• Just a few feet to the left, the layout is in a much less finished state, with a lot of scenery work and modeling still to be done.

By no means was the photo or the scene it captured ready for publication. But the photos helped me to validate the composition and to identify what needed to be improved. To the casual observer, it looked pretty good; the better-trained eye may have picked up other problems. But it was staged in such a way that there was no way to identify some of the obvious faults that existed.

The moral of the story? I think there are at least two:

• Use your camera as a modeling tool. Phone cameras are pretty good these days, and the placement of the lens means you can get a perspective that is close to what a scale-sized human would see. The photos will reveal things that the eye tends to overlook. It will help you improve your scenes.
  …but more importantly…
• Don’t get frustrated because you think your layout could never look as good as in the magazines. You don’t know what’s just outside the photo frame.

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* Not exclusively, of course. There are plenty of sad posts about dying relatives and such, but you get the gist.

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