Monthly archives: June, 2017

Step Into My World

The camera lens allows us to interpret, capture, and experience our models in a way that simply isn’t possible with the naked eye. It takes us to the place we envisioned when we started this whole layout building process.  The image above of Federal Cold Storage took most of a weekend to get the end…


Appreciating the Ordinary

It’s the first week in August 2008 and the switch job works Sweetener Products, swapping loads for empties, pulling, pushing and swapping flat black tanks.  It’s what they did the week before and will do the week after. There’s a certain timeless appeal in the pure ordinariness of rail operations.  


Moving Models From Plastic to Art

From time to time I think about why model building never made the leap from recreation to fine art.  Why is it that a sculpture can have mass appeal for the ages and be museum worthy but at best, a well done model seems relegated to a small niche museum.  Why is it that when…


Compelling Video June 17

The Elephant in the Corner of the Room   The constructive criticism received on the LAJ practice video fell into two areas, the white balance and the bit of choppiness in sound transitions. Noted, but also very simple to fix. The purpose of the exercise was to experiment with some techniques but primarily to unearth…


Compelling Video Imagery – June 12

I spent the better part of the weekend working on a practice/test video to test the waters as to what the challenges would be to produce something that was less “model railroady” in appearance. You can see the video HERE. Going in, I wanted to focus on three aspects of video production: Composition Lighting Audio…