I have been enjoying the hobby

Erik,

Some great pictures, artistic illusion. Sometimes seen just before sleep.

K

Awesome!!!!👍👍

Very cool!

Thanks guys, glad it lifted your spirits today 👍🙂

Outstanding, as usual from Erik.

Erik, absolutely fantastic as always!

Great photos as usual Eric.  I always look forward to your postings and yes, they do brighten my day!

Thank you for sharing,

Don

Eric, i love your 1950s photos, and I love it when your kids are in the photos too!

Thanks fellas

Exactly why I follow you.

Love the smoke!

Wow, amazing trains, amazing scenes, Super photography…. Thanks for allowing us OGR Forum members to see your work.

Fantastic artistic work...I was asking myself are these real train shots...and then the last picture revealed the secret.

Terrific artistry and imagination. Thanks for sharing.

grass and landscaping is fantastic.........

Farm House makes me wonder how soon Ma’s gonna be ringing the triangle to get everybody in for lunch!

Thanks fellas,

Not a whole lot of post edit work on these.

The set ups are a few hours of fun.

varied weather and light will really go a long way to nailing the realism

Spotted some issues, quick adjustments

props everywhere

testing angles for proper forced perspective with the background, I don’t like sky replacements and fake backgrounds unless it’s a hot water heater in your basement and you must; most of the fellas doing it fail to get the light and color temps right and blow it; if possible for what I am doing it must be done in the same frame and if any adjustments are made with the background it must match the same photo shoot; I can’t shoot a background in May on a partly cloudy day in mid morning and combine the model shoot done in October evening light, = totally bonkers.. if you need to because of the pesky hot water heater in the background.

forced perspective is the key to this.. heck, I load em up and haul my Rio Grande stuff up the Moffat and shoot in its native habitat! Now that’s ‘Deep Fake’ ! ….adding steam and exhaust is not crucial but for me a steam locomotive that isn’t breathing is stuffed and mounted. Not interested in that, and no “photoshop airbrushing tool” smoke, absolutely not that’s pure cheesy about as bad as cotton-balls stuck out of the stack. Use the real deal from a 1:1 shot and get the light and shadow, color temperature right and it’s pay dirt!

not a whole lot of post, and some simulation of old film tweaking the colors, a neat little term called “ anachronistic “ photography.

this one was a little more work, but wanted the sun to line up right so I needed to remove the neighbors cars and did some cloning of the module over them. It’s a model not real, so why not use my tools to make this work

I am happy with the results and enjoy making, building, and photography of my models, if someone doesn’t like it, well let’s just write here you can’t make everyone happy.

on a side note, I have made some guys really mad at me on other forums such as MRH and have received several hate direct messages for doing as they put it, “fraudulent photography”, That’s right, yeah! No, Seriously, fraud! Like there is some kind of railfan-police-force on the ‘straight from the camera’ miniature model railroading photography. It’s a 1/48 scale toy train for heavens sake, this is not photo journalism! And yes, of course it’s deep fake, they are toys! Good grief.

Furthermore I’ve had guys spitting nails, mad at me for as they put it, I “fooled them, same as being lied to”, “where does the reality end and the fake begin?”, “I’ve seen top modeling that doesn’t need cheap-shot photoshop to cover up your bad modeling, stop sharing this crap, only (*censored) can do this right and you can’t”. Nice stuff like that.

Like I wrote you can’t please everybody, but you sure can make some of them mad! I don’t care, I guess I’ll break the railfan-model-railroading-photo-police force laws and make these deep fake poorly carried out shots of my bad models. I want them to look at real as possible; it’s what I want and that’s all that matters. This is how I enjoy our hobby.

Man, those are some impressive photos. I could have sworn that the D&RGW passenger train was real! It's just a model. Keep up the good work.

Erik, you just go ahead and "break the railfan-model-railroading-photo-police force laws" to your hearts content. Thank you for showing what can be done!

Dan Weinhold