Diorama upgrades

Triskelion 911 on the new racetrack. The track is actually sanding paper, painted and weathered.

Published 06/02/20

A couple of months ago I decided that I wasn’t happy with many of my photos. Well, the photos per se were (kind of?) passable, but the scenery wasn’t. So slowly I started to reshoot a LOT of my cars, specially those that were not on a diorama setting. But after many reshoots, with admittedly improved photos, I still wasn’t 100% pleased. I came to a conclusion that my current track diorama was a limiting factor – it’s not good enough anymore.

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The old track. The printed paper is too shiny for realistic photos.

I bought that first track a couple of years ago, and have used it a lot. However, now it looks much better than when I originally got it, because I weathered it and added some realistic grass. Nonetheless, the track surface is printed, with no texture. And kind of shiny, which is prone to reflections, that sometimes screws up my shots. That was getting on my nerves, so last month I grew a pair and began to make two new dioramas, a racetrack and a street.

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Applying static grass to the street diorama – a very messy ordeal.

Both gave me a lot (LOT) of work to complete, with hours of masking and painting – road surface, zebras, road stripes and weathering. I even bought a whatchamacallit device to apply static grass to the sides, which really improves the looks. And by the way, you can’t imagine the mess that thing makes…😣 But after long days of waiting for paint to dry (so that I could apply the next coat) I finished the racetrack last week and the street I finished this Sunday.

With that, from now on I think (or hope) that my photos may look a little better 🤔. The next step is a camera upgrade, but that one will be (a tad?) more expensive… 📷

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