Making Cisco Mercantile, part 4

: At last, night had fallen to Cisco.

I’m trying to duplicate the whole town of Cisco, Utah in N scale. Here, I represent the making of Cisco Mercantile.

Here are the night scenes. I thought fluorescent light would be suitable for this 70’s cafe. So, I used single 3.2V 20mA round diffusion white LED for the cafe interior. Single LED in the space would make sharp and clear shades too.

I installed the LED on the bottom of roof trusses, not to light the other rooms. Also is that the LED is placed a little near the back wall to let the light draw long shadow on the street. As there was few streetlight at Cisco, streets were dark enough to show shadows from the windows. I wanted that because long shadows on streets are also appeared in the Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks”.

: Thanks to the sticky customer,

: shadows grew long on the street,

: in the darkness of the night.

Thanks to the LED, clear and long shade grew on the street. To catch this image, I put off the base light to take the picture. The result resembles the painting “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper.


さて、問題のLED照明だが、結果はご覧のとおり。ネオンが光っているように見えるだろうか？

カフェのインテリアには、先が円錐形に凹んだ「拡散型」という白色LEDを１灯組み込んでいる。他の部屋に光りが漏れないよう、天井面より下に光源がくるように取り付けた。点光源なので外にまでくっきりとした影が落ち、雰囲気はよい。

ネオンサインは以前示したLEDである。当然ながら素子の前にしか光が行かないので、肉眼では上の写真ほどうまく光っていない。光源をもう少し看板の根元側に寄せるべきだった。

地明かりなしで撮ってみたら、参照したエドワード・ホッパーの絵のような雰囲気の写真になった。