Capturing the mundane…
I recognise a strange attraction to the mundane, the down at heel, the slightly past it’s best and the persistent trier…
So often I see over saturated focus stacked images with photoshopped skies and fake smoke, exaggerating the worst of our modeling by looking along the length of some OO gauge track and showing massive fish plates or a gaping holes between ballast and platform, buildings and the ground.
I would love to see a more emotional and considered approach in our media. One that understands the artist and their subject and uses that to inform not only the style of article but even how it’s photographed and presented.
As much as I love the colour photos on Pont-y-dulais, if I’m honest with myself it is the wonderfully evocative black and white photos from books showing the NCB lines in South Wales, reinforced recently with Gordon Edgar’s wonderful photo album. So I present today a gritty grainy shot, taken in a dry spell of a wet day in the 1970s as both HUOs and Ruston have been retired from British Rail and eek out their remaining days being as useful as ever fuelling our hunger for heat and power.
What drives your own modelling? What are you hoping to evoke in your own kind, or that of others? Until next time more soon…
A certain school of model railway does seem to have emerged, and been taken to extremes, rather like the early days of HDR photography. It does raise a question about what good model photography is. For me it sympathetically brings out the the realism in the model. I suppose that is particularly true when it recreates a scene we only know from photos. I must admit I find many modern photos of the real thing rather dull and repetitive as well, but if that is what you've grown up with I guess it is what you will try and model.
ReplyDeletePerhaps that exaggeration of faults isn't a bad thing if other people notice and learn from it. For that matter there are probably a few layouts from my formative years that I would be less impressed with if I saw them in a modern photo
Thank you James.
DeleteYour reflections are in tune with my own, perhaps I’m missing Finescale, as that really did seem to be the middle ground.