How to photograph a bird's-eye view of your layout

A few tips for making your own aerial photo

By Gerry Leone

Published: Saturday, August 31, 2002

Click on images for larger view.

In the March 2002 issue of Model Railroader magazine Gerry Leone describes how he photographed a bird's-eye view of his layout in order to see it as a complete integrated world rather than a series of eye-level scenes. Here's an interactive version of Gerry's photo from MR and some tips Gerry found helpful for taking aerial photographs. Move your curser over the highlighted portions of the photo for a close-up and explanation.

If you're planning to make a composite aerial shot of your layout for yourself, you may appreciate a few lessons I learned learned along the way:

Start the process early
Start taking "aerial" photos as early in your layout building process as you can. That way you'll have a good record of your benchwork.

Take more shots than you need
There's nothing more frustrating than finding out you moved just a little too far between consecutive shots, and now the composite has a gap. Or finding out too late that one of the overhead lights was perfectly reflected in your glossy river. You're shooting digital, so why be stingy? Take many more shots than you need, especially if your camera's lens introduces slight distortions along the edges, as mine does. It's much easier to combine bits and pieces of several shots than it is to set up the camera all over again to take one shot.

Try to include a train or buildings
Granted, having trains and buildings everywhere is visual overkill. But it often helps to have something in the shots besides track, plywood, and trees. Having a train or buildings in the shots speeds up alignment in the composite 200 percent.

Use Photoshop's "transparency" setting
If you use Photoshop, you'll discover that it will automatically assign each photo a new layer as you bring it into the master composite. Use that layer's "transparency" to help you position the photo over and/or next to the preceding shot. Setting the layer's transparency to 60 or 70 percent is like using tracing paper, and will help keep your composite from getting distorted. Just be sure to reset transparency to 100 percent when you're done.

Macros make the job easier
If you're using one of the later versions of Photoshop, you can make use of a user-recordable macro to speed things along. For example, I reduced each of my individual shots by 50 percent to keep the Photoshop file smaller. I also added a little brightness and contrast to each, bumped up the color, and added a little of the "unsharp" filter. Setting up this macro at the very beginning not only helped make the job of importing photos faster, it also was my insurance that each of the shots had the same "processing" applied to it.