Having made an absolute ton of models, I needed to try and photograph them to see how they'd look sat in a forest environment. Unfortunately, with much of the countryside surrounding the house being built-over in a spirited attempt to tarmac Yorkshire, the only bit nearby was a wall outside the house, and trying to shoot pics at twilight for dramatic effect was proving very limiting. Not to mention I couldn't really photograph the railway-based subjects with them just balanced on a drystone wall.
The solution was to build a photo set, as cheaply and simply as possible. Size-wise, I reckoned I could do it using scrap A1 card from work, with a simple frame (also from scrap) knocked up to support it. Grass from hanging basket liner, rocks from... well, rocks, and water from mirrored card.
Working to the budget meant model trees wouldn't be an option, so I cut a ton out from card and glued them to some cut-up cardboard tubes, on the basis that if I was careful with their placement, the trees could be rotated to hide the fact that they were mainly flat.
Landforms were made from packing foam, the idea being a large plane of land in the centre would be surrounded on two sides by raised ground, behind which could be placed the trees (helping to disguise the basic nature of the cardboard tube-trunks...
Hanging basket liner, painted sponge, and rocks hastily applied, around silver card for a pond.
Terribly basic, yes, but it just needs to give an effect for photographing the models...
The back scene was another couple of sheets of card, dusted with sky blue paint.
The finished set.
Some work rotating the trees to face the camera...
...and some dramatic lighting later, and it did the trick.
The problem though was that certain of the models were based on trains, most of them on 0 gauge chassis, and I needed a railway line in the same sort of environment. So I decided to base the set on the concept art for the breakdown crane monster; the railway on a raised stone embankment, trees in the background.
The boards were the same size, and built to the same technique and with the same materials.
Track was cheap toy plastic track from a couple of train sets (bought for another shoot), part-buried in the hanging-basket liner to give the effect of abandoned, overgrown railway lines.
The final effect, seen from rail-level nicely conveys what I was after (with the older model of "Welsh Pony" from a concept-shoot doing the duty as test-model, to see if the set works). OK so both sets were very basic, but they did the job of backgrounds for the concept models very nicely...
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