Re-Locating Williams Creek: 9

The scenery is still not finished, but this shot shows an eye-level view of the creamery road heading into the backdrop. The photo of the old country road seems to blend well. 

I'm rapidly approaching the end of the Williams Creek relocation project - which is a good thing since Colonel Zeb Carson "Buck" Williams III, USA, the scene's namesake, is going to be visiting sometime this summer! 
I tried painting a road onto the backdrop and found it less than satisfying. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that I stink at painting manmade objects like buildings, trains, ships, boats, and yes, even roads. But the creamery road runs directly into the backdrop so I had to find a way to lessen the shock of the transition from modeled scene to 2-dimensional backdrop. 
Bernie Kempinski has had some success at incorporating photos of structures (barns, houses, and the like) into painted backdrops. In fact we cut out some farm houses and barns and pasted them to the upper deck backdrop back when the layout was double deck. The buildings can be readily blended into the scene by painting a tree or bush around the base or even partially obscuring the building with a large tree or the like. 
I decided the concept a little further and see if I could use a photo to transition the road from the 3D scenery to the backdrop. Success rides on having the right photo. I took this photo up in Maryland last autumn.

The prototype photo. Taken in Maryland last October. 

The road had a slight rise to it, and since I'm modeling a remote two-lane road in rural Vermont in the 1950s I didn't want a lot of markings, lane lines and the like. 
I reduced the photo to the point where the road just about matched the width of the modeled road, and then printed it out on ordinary color printed paper. I trimmed the sky and some of the foreground out of the print and slid the picture into place. 

Sliding the printed photo into place. 

I did move some of the trees around since the picture has green trees on the right and almost barren trees on the left. This helped blend the image. The top photo shows how this looks in place. I need to do some fine blending of the top of the trees into the painted backdrop, and will weather the road to match the photo after I add the scenic textures, but the effect seems to work.