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Modelmaking... the final frontier! These are the exposures of the starship... EXTRASIZE. It's ongoing
mission, to please new websurfers, and create more eyecandy. To boldly photograph what no man has glued before!
Constructed for a customer in England, I built this
model of the Starship Enterprise with the Fiber Optic Lighting Kit mostly box stock, with a few modifications....
First, I used none of the fiber optics! They are way too
tiny for windows this size, and I don't like working with them anyway. Lighting was achieved by cutting out the windows in the hull and filling them with white glue, which dries translucent,
for the "glass". I used the 6-volt power supply which came with the kit and added seven more light bulbs in the primary hull saucer.
The inside of all hull parts were sprayed
with the common "bumper chrome" paint which is quite reflective and also makes a very good light proof barrier to keep the lights from shining through the plastic hull. The lights in the
warp engine sections were done exactly as shown in the kit's instructions.
Many Star Trek purists out there may argue that I used the wrong colours for the ship, but since it
seems that of the several models built for the show, they all look slightly different depending on the lighting, so I made the darn thing look the way I think it looks overall on screen!
I photographed the model's "lit up" shots by using a multiple exposure "beauty-pass/light-pass" technique just as the studio model is done. This technique shows promise, but I
still need to improve on the timing of the various exposures! The beauty passes in these shots were underexposed, as are the cabin lights... These lights look much better in person in a dark room
than in these photographs!
I really should have done three passes to do it right, by splitting the light pass into two seperate exposures, one for the engine and sensor dish lights and one
for the cabin lights by masking the lights not being exposed for each pass by covering them with black paper or similar. However the customer is waiting for his model and I had to pack it up and
send it. I'll keep all this in mind for the next project!
-- E. James Small
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