As I’ve been exploring my NS&T car barn layout with a camera, one of the things I’ve really enjoyed is how this structure pops out of the photos. The eye is immediately drawn to it.
The credit for that goes to an accident of lighting. When shooting photos, I tend to extinguish all of the room lights and rely solely upon the eight-foot-long strip of LED lighting that I’ve mounted on a temporary valence. As a result, the rest of the room is in blackness – and that blackness forms an ideal backdrop for focussing one’s attention on the models.
While I stumbled on this by accident, Jonathan Jones made a deliberate choice to use a black background for his N scale CNJ Newark Branch layout – and he writes about this in Model Railroad Planning 2023. Jonathan is an architect and brings his professional sense of framing and hierarchy to the presentation of his layout. I learned a lot from reading it – allowing me to better express my own ideas about showing off my work. His article alone is well worth the price of the issue.
Jonathan’s approach will not appeal to most hobbyists, who will instead dream of perfectly rendered paintings or photographs of the places they’re modelling. But it sure worked for me – and I found it interesting to contrast Jonathan’s presentation with other articles in the same magazine that also featured urban railroading.
I went down this road – sort of – with my previous layout (Port Rowan in 1:64), when I used a 70-foot long roll of plain blue fabric as a backdrop:
Adopting a black backdrop would be one step further – and I think I should take it. Or at least try it. I do like to make trying new ideas before passing judgement a part of my hobby and more often than not I’m rewarded for taking chances. And this one is easy: A few feet of fabric (or some of my recently-acquired styrene sheet painted flat black) is a low-cost experiment that’s also 100% reversible if I decide it’s too daring.
(Thanks, Jonathan, for writing such a thoughtful article. It has changed my thinking.)
The Model Railway Show 