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Hooper & Co Diorama


Anglia105E

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Many thanks, Eric...... and your compliments are much appreciated!  Here are a couple of official photographs that appear at the top of the very first page of the RREC Annual Show report, and taken by a professional photographer. There are hundreds of photos in the review of the show, but somehow I managed to get onto the cover page with my dioramas display stand.

David

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Completed the assembly of the 1:43 scale Victorian Terraced Houses backs kit this weekend, and I am ready to start assembling the terraced houses fronts kit from Monday..... I have really enjoyed working with card and PVA glue, and I am very impressed with these kits. Need to prepare a baseboard for this third diorama, which will be 75 cm x 75 cm square to cover the surface of a 65 cm x 65 cm folding table. Photo shoots will be outdoors at a carefully selected location, and the real background has to be perfect for forced perspective photography, using natural daylight this time.

David

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The latest addition to the 1:43 scale model car collection arrived today, and here are a few photos of this car alongside the Victorian terraced houses. This is an Oxford Diecast Austin Princess hearse, which does not contain a coffin or a driver. The black & white images seem to work better than the colour shots, I think.

David

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Not at all a stupid question, Pat..... In architecture and city planning, a terrace or terrace house (UK) or townhouse (US)[1] is a form of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the 16th century, whereby a row of attached dwellings share side walls. They are also known in some areas as row houses (especially in Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.Terrace Housing. ... Terraced houses are structurally built the same and both sides of each house shares walls with neighbours. Main advantage of a terraced house: It is generally cheaper than detached and semi-detached properties. The first and last of these houses is called an end terrace, and is often a different layout from the houses in the middle, sometimes called mid-terrace

My 1:43 scale model, or O-gauge if you like, is a pair of end terrace houses, so they are in effect both ' semi-detached ' houses.

David

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On ‎7‎/‎12‎/‎2019 at 4:33 PM, Anglia105E said:

Many thanks, Eric...... and your compliments are much appreciated!  Here are a couple of official photographs that appear at the top of the very first page of the RREC Annual Show report, and taken by a professional photographer. There are hundreds of photos in the review of the show, but somehow I managed to get onto the cover page with my dioramas display stand.

David

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Congratulations on making the cover of the Show Report.  That is quite an honor and well deserved.

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The assembly of the two Victorian terraced houses has been completed, and work has started on the layout of roadways and paving. These streets are made of high quality card and are being mounted on the MDF baseboard with PVA glue. There is still quite a lot of work to do yet on the diorama baseboard, but I can now see where this is going. Thinking carefully about the layout of these streets and the arrangement of the junctions is quite easy to get wrong!

David

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Thanks Gary..... the priority at this stage is to set up the far left corner of the baseboard, so that the end of the street in this diorama can be blended seamlessly with a real road in an outdoor setting, within the next few days. Of course, this will be tricky to set up initially, so some trial and error will be necessary. Following the outdoor forced perspective photography, there will be some indoor photography, when the diorama evolves into a terraced house street scene complete with telephone kiosk, post box, cars and figures, telegraph poles and wires..... and wherever my imagination leads me! The outdoor scene will include a funeral hearse that is either approaching the Victorian terraced houses, or leaving the houses by the road that recedes into the distance. These photos will be taken at dawn to catch the quality of light that only sunrise can provide..... assuming that I can get up early!

David

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I managed to get up at 4.15 am this morning and I arrived at the location for the dawn photo shoot at 5.05 am, just before sunrise. Rattled off 167 shots over a two hour period, some of which are in colour and some in B&W. I would say that three issues have been thrown up during this experimental photo shoot..... one is that the real road surface is light grey in colour, while my diorama road surface is more of a creamy beige sandstone colour. Secondly, the model road surface buckled quite severely, which is due to a lack of PVA glue being applied over the entire under surface of the roadways, so only along the edges. Lastly, there are many photos where either the foreground is slightly out of focus or the background is out of focus, which does not help achieve the seamless joining of the diorama baseboard with the real background setting. Of course, with a DSLR camera you can use the F6 setting to fix this issue, but my compact Kodak camera does not have ' F ' settings.

Anyway, here are 12 photos from the batch of 167 photos taken.

David

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I am inspired by the work of Michael Paul Smith, who was the expert when it came to this photography technique..... so I am learning too, Pat.

Yes, Gary..... the building is attached to the baseboard with double-sided tape, and it requires tipping on edge to get the diorama through the door of my house.

David

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These following photos were taken indoors, using one 100 watt daylight bulb, showing the third diorama in 1:43 scale with the first of the street lamps added. The hearse is waiting outside the Victorian terraced houses early in the morning...........

David

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The following series of photos shows the next stage of the composition, now that there are flowers on top of the hearse roof rack.... also there is a second Austin Princess behind the hearse and the gentleman in the brown suit has changed into a black suit out of respect for the job he is doing..... if only he had remembered to put on a black tie....

David

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Thanks, Gary...... I found the flowers listed on Ebay as 7 mm, O-gauge, 1:43 and they were quite cheap as a single pack of 11 clumps. There are only 3 clumps of flowers on the hearse roof.

Watch this space for the next photo shoot, which could be quite interesting.....

David

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Your comment is much appreciated, as always, Eric...... and here are three further photographs that show the alleyway that is being constructed as we speak. This cobbled stone alleyway runs along the rear facing aspect of the terraced houses, and then turns a corner to run along the side of one of the houses. I am building a wall in two sections that follows this alleyway, which is a 7 foot high red brick wall with granite copings along the top of the wall. Close to end of the alleyway, where the gentleman is seated on the wooden bench at the moment, there will be a brick built bus shelter for the bus stop. One telegraph pole has been erected, and this will be followed by a second telegraph pole with wires that connect the poles, as well as supplying the two houses. Materials have arrived to provide also drain pipes and guttering for the houses. Currently I am experimenting with a product called Atmosphere Aerosol, which is basically fog in a can, or canned fog if you like. As yet I have not achieved the effect that I am looking for, which is early morning fog at the time of the funeral scene.

David

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The two lengths of red brick wall have been assembled and these are now in place on the diorama baseboard, creating an alleyway as I intended. Also. I have just assembled a Victorian red brick Bus Shelter kit during the past two days. This has turned out nicely, and from the following series of photos you can see how the bus shelter and the walls fit into the diorama setting. The tree that was previously used in my 1:24 scale diorama seems to be more suitable for this 1:43 scale diorama, and it is useful for providing dappled rays of light that fall on the red brick buildings.

David

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Gary..... I know what you mean about the distractions in the room, but these previous photos were more about showing the bus shelter and walls, rather than the diorama setting as a whole. Later, when I shoot the more advanced photos I shall set up background white boards, which will hide any unwanted background objects that are in the room. Further photography will be outdoors, which will make use of a real background in natural daylight, and of course forced perspective also.

Few more photos here, taken with early morning sunlight, so not the 100 watt daylight bulb as in the previous set of photos. The gentleman in the top hat standing at the bus shelter looks more like a bouncer standing at the door of a night club !

David

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