Thanks guys! Shingles is annoying, but with the Valtrex and Tylenol, I managing okay and sleeping well. I do believe that it's giving me a lesser case of it.
Here's the Essex in the case I put together yesterday. I did not do the neatest job gluing it together, but it's fully functional and now that very delicate model is protected for the long haul.
As things have it, I just met a very nice man my age here in Louisville who is as passionate about photography as I am about trains and model building in general. We had met earlier on a board we were on together, and he remembered that I am a proficient solderer. He had a hearing aid sterilizer that had a bad switch on a circuit board and asked if I could take a look at it. I replaced his switch and we found that we had much in common especially our professional career philosophies. Then along comes the note from RMC about needing a better finished model picture of Bernheim for the article and this gentlemen is going to help me photograph it.
Today I changed out the two fluorescents hanging near Bernheim with the Costco LED lights, and started experimenting putting the backdrop in place. Before I went to the trouble of attaching the sky blue bulletin board paper to the backdrop boards, I took an iPhone pic and sent it to the editor to see if what I had done was correct. I had two choices: put the backdrop at the rear edge of the layout, or put it directly behind the distillery. The picture I sent him was this.
He said nearer would be better. So I moved the panels to immediately behind the model. I then took another shot just to see how it works. The photographer's bringing professional lights with umbrellas so the front of the building won't be suffering in shadow as it does. The LEDs do provide significantly more and warmer light than the florescents so every couple of months when Costco features them I'm going to pick a couple up and in a year or so all the layout lights will be converted over.
Remember, all this backdrop will be blue and the lighting will be correct. It certainly isn't now. I am really excited about this article getting published…finally. I had really given up on it. Now I have to start thinking about the next ones. I should develop a more professional photo shooting area for the all the in-progress pictures. I'm noticing that folks that do construction articles regularly have their in-progress shots done with pretty good lighting and very plain backgrounds. You have to plan ahead for that.
