A few non-railroad photos

Okay... this has nothing whatsoever to do with model railroading. That's the way it goes. One of my other hobbies, which actually predates my interest in model trains by a couple of decades, is photography. I was really into photography pretty heavily for a long time, and I would spend hours working in my darkroom every chance I got. I did it all.... black & white, high contrast Kodalith, color prints, slides, and Cibachrome process. I also got into a lot of 'experimental' darkroom stuff.

Nowadays, I no longer work in a traditional wet side/dry side darkroom. Like a lot of photographers, I've gone completely digital. So my 'darkroom' work is all carried out using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

However, I still have a lot of prints and transparencies from 'the good old days.' Here are a few of them. And no, these are not 'Photoshopped' pictures. They are scans of the original prints/slides I made years ago.

The first photo is a slide I shot. The subject is the Emperor's Palace, Tokyo, Japan. I shot the original in 1971, while in Japan. Several years later, I enlarged the slide on B/W paper to get the reversed image and then used blue toner on the resulting print.

The second photo is a B/W print shot in a makeshift 'studio.' A special Kenko lens was mounted on the camera lens to create the multiple wine glasses. After the film and print were processed, the print was put through a dark blue toner for several minutes.

The last photo is one I shot (on slide film) in the early morning at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1982. No special processing was done; those are the actual colors captured in the early dawn hours.

From time to time, I will post other photos from the past. I realize that no one reads these blogs of mine, but I'll do it anyway.... :)

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.

A year already???

Well, what do you know? I can't believe it's been a year since my last posting... a year to the day as a matter of fact. I really should try to keep up with this, although I don't know why. Nobody reads it - the lack of replies made that obvious a year ago. Perhaps I'll start posting some stuff I wrote many years ago. See what happens.

But just in case anybody is lurking, I'll post a photo of something I've done in the year since the last update. And in case anybody cares, I just finished 4 new articles for Finescale Railroader's Annual books. "Uncle Russ" wanted my articles on staining stripwood and shingles. I don't know the publication dates yet, but it will probably be a few months before the first article sees print.

A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day: My last girlfriend was easily entertained. All I had to do was sit and listen to her.