Of Painted Backdrops, Mt. Lowe, and E. L. Moore

One of the backdrops hanging from the curtain rod support ready for a photo shoot.

I've been working on painting two backdrops to be used when shooting Mt. Lowe layout glamour shots. They're fairly big things: 30" x 40" illustration boards painted with artist's acrylics. 

I haven't done these sorts of paintings before and was a little reticent about getting started. At first I thought maybe I should get a couple enlargements made of photos I took on the Mt. Lowe trail to use as backdrops, but gave up on that because they wouldn't look right. They'd be 'photo realistic' and the layout would be 'craft realistic'. The two forms of realism wouldn't go together.

I finally realized that even if my backdrop paintings were rough-and-ready things it didn't matter too much because in any given photo not much of the background would be visible. There'd just be hints of sky and distant mountains. Once I realized this I didn't have any problem diving in and having a go.

The second backdrop.

The skies are just loose mixes of Liquitex cobalt blue and titanium white acrylic tube paints. For the mountain profiles I first troweled on some Golden brand Fiber Paste to give them some texture as I didn't think I could create convincing textures with paint alone. Once the paste was hardened I painted on colours I used on the layout's mountains. When that was dry I applied some thin washes of cobalt blue to create a little aerial perspective.

Backdrop painting E. L. Moore used for his Canal Boats article.

This work on backdrops got me thinking about the backdrop work E. L. Moore did for his photo setups, especially the one I think he used for his unpublished Canal Boats article. I still don't know if he painted this one or any of the others he used over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if he did, but I don't have any supporting evidence.

A Gemini colourization of the Canal Boats backdrop painting.

Be that as it may, I started to wonder what that Canal Boats backdrop painting would look like colourized. I asked Gemini to colour it, and that image up there is what it produced. It's quite credible, and Gemini seems to have done a little restoration to the image as well.

Looking through E. L. Moore's photos it looks like he used a number of painted backdrops over the years. I'm curious to see if Gemini could strip out the foreground images, fill in missing backdrop imagery from the stripped areas, and colourize the result to create pictures of what those backdrops might have looked like. An interesting project for another time.