Dioramas aren't great for operating. After all they hardly have any track and often they don't even have a run around. But for super-detailing and photography they can be hard to beat!

After putting my timesaver on the back deck of my new house and taking pictures with a natural habitat for a backdrop I wanted to try again with something a bit better sceniced. This resulted in the construction of the Redland Diorama (so called because it featured the Redland Mill and Feed on it - not to be confused with the town of Redland on the new Bear Creek & South Jackson under construction in my basement).

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My John Allen Timesaver outdoors!

The Redland Diorama - 2004-2005

These pictures were taken either outdoors in various locations or in my basement. The lighting and sky should give clues about where each picture was taken.

In general, outdoors in "real" lighting gives more realistic pictures. But its necessary to pay close attention to the background. If you let a full size object in the background (especially something man-made) get too close to the diorama it will look like a Godzilla style object.

Of course you do tend to get nice skies. And if the background more or less matches the foreground it can look awfully nice. But you also get all the regular hassles of taking pictures outdoors

• Gotta wait for the sun to move to get the lighting color you want
• Want clouds? If there ain't none you're stuck. Conversely if you want a sunny blue-sky day and it's overcast there's not much you can do about it.
• Is everything firmly attached? You'll find out what isn't if the wind comes up...
• Did somebody mention depth of field problems?
• Hey, is it raining?

Indoors you can control the light and there's no wind (if the windows are closed). But if you want a background you have to build it, paint it, or photograph it yourself. And depth of field is always a problem when photographing HO scale models (because the camera is farther away from O-scale models for the same angle of view, depth of field is a much smaller issue, with N-scale it's a horrid problem).

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