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Four battleships


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I came across these four dreadnoughts I had in storage and had built a number of years ago. They consisted of 1/600 models of the HMS Nelson, the HMS Iron Duke and the USS North Carolina and a motorized 1/450 model of the IJN Haruna. The first two British battleships were Airfix kits, but it escapes me now as to who made the other two kits. All the models had suffered some damage over the years and had missing parts and, in any case, were pretty basic amateur builds even in their heyday !

Most of the effort at this point was to clean them up, try to re-attach a couple of loose parts and then photograph them in a nice setting (as far as battleships are concerned, at least, which is sailing around an ocean letting everyone know just who's in charge !)

The battleships were imaged with a DLSR against a white background to allow them to be placed against a sky and ocean background later. Some of the skies and sea surfaces were created digitally in the computer and others were various combinations of real and digital skies and waves.

The dreadnoughts each had some digital touch ups to try and fix some lost parts and add missing rigging and the ships wakes and smoke was added later, too. The Haruna picture was "aged" and converted to a black and white image.

If a talented builder were to use a well-done ship model and take pictures of it, I think they would be capable of getting very good final images, far beyond what was attempted here. All these ships were full-hull models, so it's possible a waterline model would make for an easier insertion into a final image, or, perhaps, the ability to photograph such a model from a low, "sea-level" angle and avoid having to do much in the way digital effects at all to product a quite nice "realistic" shot.

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HMS Nelson 1mod5XCZ by mikedetorrice, on Flickr

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Iron Duke 1v8XCZ by mikedetorrice, on Flickr

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USS North Carolina 9XCZ by mikedetorrice, on Flickr

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Haruna 1mod7XCZ by mikedetorrice, on Flickr

Mike

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Great looking ships, nicely presented...looks real...!!

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