A few magazine articles in the works

A week ago this past Sunday, "Uncle Russ" Reinberg, the editor/publisher of (now defunct) Finescale Railroader magazine and Finescale Railroader's 'Annual' books, sent me an email wondering what I had been up to lately and did I have any interesting photos of models that I could send him. (By way of explanation, Russ has published about a dozen or so of my photos in the old magazine and more recently in the Narrow Gauge Annual and the Logging and Mining Annual. He's also published three of my articles in past years.)

In my reply, I mentioned a couple of modeling projects I had been working on during the past year. And I told him about a series of articles I had prepared as 'tutorial' pieces on staining and weathering stripwood, and had posted as downloadable pdf's on my website. He wrote back later that day full of enthusiasm for the articles and said he wants to publish them in the upcoming Annual books. He also wants the article I had posted on staining paper shingles, as well as an article on my "Tie Hacker's Yard" diorama, which he saw photos of on my site. Since all of the photos I used in the pdf versions were downsized for screen viewing, not print, I've had to spend the past several days processing (in Adobe Lightroom2) high-res TIFF files suitable for printing. I'm finally finished and yesterday I burned the first four articles - a little over 4 GB's worth of files - to DVD and put them in the mail to Russ. I have no idea when they will actually see print but they're on the way. I suspect, however, he will print them one at a time over the next 3-4 years in The Modelers' Annual, which comes out in November/December of each year.

I still have to write the article about the diorama, but there's no rush on that.

Anyway, here are some photos from the articles I sent to Russ yesterday.

A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day: When someone tells you he's lost in thought, he probably is. After all, it's unfamiliar territory.