Dinosaurs in the Hobby Room
A grey walking machine stands astride the rails, a driver with a helmet in its seat, and a little way behind it the jungle begins. That is what the hobby room looks like when the layout belongs to a different idea for a few days. I photographed the scene across two days in July 2025, and ended up with 76 frames on the card.
Building means shifting things around
The track is fixed and so is the ballast. Everything else has to fit between: rocks, palm fronds, ferns, raptors among the sleepers, a wooden hut with a platform where two explorers in wide hats stand looking into the trees. It takes a few evenings, and most of that time goes on things nobody ever sees — packing something underneath so a rock sits level, hiding a cable, turning a dinosaur so it doesn’t stare into the lens like a toy on a shelf.
The hard part is the edges. The big green rock in the foreground reads as landscape from the front; from the side you see at once where it stops. So you never build a scene, you build a scene for one particular viewpoint. Everything that falls apart two steps to the left is still built correctly, as long as the camera ends up where it is meant to be.
The light is the real subject
Coloured fairy lights hang above the layout — blue, turquoise, magenta — with warm light from the shelving behind. To the eye that is atmosphere; to the camera it is a mess. The white balance has nothing to hold on to, and the figures end up with blue cheeks. I never quite got it under control on either day, and in the end I left the colour casts in, because they suit the scene better than a neutrally corrected version.
Then there is depth of field. Wide open and a hand’s width away, the locomotive is sharp and the cab already isn’t. A tripod would have been the right answer. Working handheld from a crouch is faster, which is exactly why roughly every third frame is slightly shaken.
From 76 down to a handful
Sorting takes longer than shooting. Shaken ones out, mis-focused ones out. Then comes the background: on several frames you can make out the cellar shelving behind the jungle, boxes and all. A little blur saves that, too wide an angle does not.
What remains is a good dozen pictures I am happy to show, and exactly one that looks like what I had in my head while building: the green locomotive numbered 99 280 on the curve, taken on the second day, shortly before I started clearing everything away again.
