Fiddlers Green

Thanks to the magic of digital photography & Photoshop I've been able to make certain components of models photorealistic: propellors, wheels and engines mostly, by taking the camera to airports & museums & clicking away.

I shoot using the longest lens possible, to reduce distortion, and carefully line the shot up to shoot the desired component dead center. I use Photoshop to remove undesirable shadows, dings in the paint & other imperfections & thus produce about as realistic a miniature of the real component as can be made. The human eye perceives a photo of the real thing as looking much more like the real thing than even a faithfully reproduced actual 3D miniature, mostly due to lighting & shadow effects. A 2D photo of a radial engine, for example, glued inside a cowling looks much more like the real engine than a meticulously detailed 3D miniature (unless the 3D miniature is itself fabricated from photographs).

I'm still trying to work out how to achieve wraparound photos of the entire airframe - thereby creating with the finished model a full 3D photograph - if I can get this to succeed I'm sure the result will be a knockout! But even with only components like wheels, props, cylinder heads, engines made from photographs, the effect transforms the model.

Mark Baird
Alameda CA

Your best bet would be to take the wraparound photographs and carefully crop and paste on to the model's template/image.

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Felix/FFDS