Photo by Andrew Salcius

Atlanta GA Nightcap HO Scale

This photo is a composite of two images. One is a stormy night sky, mountain landscape with lots of stars in the Collegiate Peaks near Buena Vista, CO (2017), the other image is of my friend’s HO model railroad, a night-time image of historic 1883 Atlanta, GA terminus (2018). I had been recording my friend’s development of this HO layout for years, and on this night, he had just installed street lights and terminal lights. I was well into night sky photography at the time with my Nikon 5100.
You can enjoy the HO layout here: (https://youtu.be/eM7Ljhl3RrQ?si=mMtU2CZSY3-aHXDZ) There is a scene in this video where I used ON1 Photo Raw generative AI to evoke magic.

Editing notesStarting with ON1 Photo RAW 2019.6 and then 2020 and watching Dylan’s “Night Sky” tutorials as well as Hudson Henry’s “Night Composite” learning to use the Develop features to adjust each image and “perfect masking" brush to carefully define the (towns) landscape, and then layers to combine. It’s actually difficult to remember exactly what I did since today’s 2025 AI features make things easier. Everything I learned using ON1 Photo Raw to create this image led to this image being published in the Aug 2020 issue of Model Railroader magazine, on a two page spread!

NIKON D5100
ƒ/8
32mm
ISO 1000
3/1 sec

Atlanta GA Nightcap HO Scale

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