The Little World

And you don’t even need to use bright colours.

This year’s scale model exhibition opened itself to new groups – and in the case of the first stand in the hall it was a wargaming outfit that built a magnificent set depicting something of the Battle of Berlin 1945.

The set components were a mixture of actual buildings and generic ones and apparently a lot of them were 3D printed. The vision and the skill employed are evident from the images, but the sheer size of the set went part of the way to winning the group one of the public awards.

That’s the voting jar. Each visitor got a button to put into the jar to vote for their favourite display. These guys got enough to become Pearly Kings!

For a scale model photographer, every angle was a winner. The hall lighting is good for some things, but problematic when it comes to colour temperature. You need to decide whether to ride with the white balance the camera calculates, dictate a custom balance, or throw flash in and open up some of the darker areas. There is no one approach that works, but I’ll say it is a definite advantage to use a high ISO and a camera that has a tilting LCD screen for the framing.

Another tip is to go early before the crowds clog the aisles. I got permission from the committee to cover the major stands hours before opening – a trick I learned from John Harney who used to shoot hotrod shows. No tripod used, but a medium zoom lens was a handy way to extend the point of view deep onto a table without disturbing the setup.