What a difference more light can make. I recently aquired a free florescent fixture. Now all I need to do is get some sort of back-drop to cover the ugly cloth walls in the furnace room!
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Yep! That looks much better. What kind of tubes are you using?
They’re the cheap sylvania, cool white bulbs. I had a twenty four pack of them at my store. When I bought them, I didn’t realize that the ballasts at my store were T10 not T12. I can’t believe how much better I like the light. I’m not usually a fan of florescent light, but this is a vast improvement. The walls in the room are some ugly fabric stapled to furring strips and styrofoam insulation. I still havn’t decided what to use for a back drop. I’m half tempted to staple a white bed sheet to the walls!
Definitely an improvement!
Have you considered a light blue sheet? Stretched tight, it would accept some shake-the-can white paint low down to simulate ‘horizon haze.’ Higher up, the fabric is already ‘high humidity blue.’
One thing is for sure. Anything would be an improvement over that Italian restaurant table cloth you have now.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Ooh, that’s a good idea! The room my trains are in was craft area for the previous owners. It was a storage area for us, so I didn’t think much about the walls. It drives me crazy now. I would have removed the fabric, but the cheap insulation will fall out. I wasn’t about to sheet rock it or panel it. The blue fabric may be the best idea yet. It’s certainly not MR worthy, but it would help with the red tint in the pictures. Thanks for the suggestion.
When you start to replace the cool white tubes as they fail, you may want to try the GE Chroma 50 (aka, Sunshine) tubes to give a truer color rendition per David Barrow’s suggestion. I have used the cool white tubes and have found them to give a greenish-bluish coloration to the colors in the scene. The color temperature of the Chroma 50 tubes is closer to that of sunlight at noon. They are more expensive than the cool white at approximately $6.00 for a package of two 48" tubes at my local Lowe’s.
Bob