The new issue really shows how far the quality of imaging in MRR (and the publishing industry in general…) has come. I was comparing the George Sellios piece with one containing similar scenes, including the water scene, in older issues and the quality of the printed image seems sharper, cleaner, and better color balanced in the new.
Kudos for whoever is responsibel for preparing photos for print!
Chris
CNH:
I haven’t got this issue yet [:(], but I’ve noticed something else about the photography in recent issues: a better variety in composition and camera angles.
I’m no photographic wizard, but at some point I started to notice that MR was concentrating heavily on a particular shot…a medium high-angled view of a scene, as if taken from a second-story window, with a train crossing diagonally through it. Lou Sassi seems to favor this shot heavily. He’s an excellent model-train photographer, and it’s not a bad shot for showing off the features of a layout. These might have led MR to use it so often that an utter neophyte in photography such as yours truly began to take notice. [:)] (It was getting to the point of the infamous three-quarter-rods-down prototype loco shot)
RMC, on the other hand, seemed to take a more creative or at least more varied approach, which you can see by lining up a bunch of RMC and MR covers next to each other and making a comparison.
As I said, it’s not a bad shot, but it was getting overdone. I like beans, but that summer when I ate beans nearly every day was a bit much. In recent months, there has been a huge change in MR’s photography, introducing lots of different views, and de-emphasizing the Sassi shot…and sometimes altering it a little when it appears. This has appeared in Lou Sassi’s photos for the magazine, as well. This makes the magazine much more interesting, and that makes me happy.
I would guess that digital photography has a lot to do with it.
I’m no photographer, but as a little personal project, I’ve scanned all of my 35mm point and shoot pics into my computer, and disposed of the old prints (yes, I am a multiple-location back-up freak, so no need to worry about that).
Back when I had a 35mm point and shoot camera, I always thought, “hey, these pictures are decent”. Now that I’ve been using a digital point-and-shoot camera, it’s amazing how the digital pics are seriously 20 times better than a similar-cost 35mm point and shoot camera. I’m talking night and day different.
I could only assume that the “smarts” built into digital cameras, as well as all of the on-the-computer post processing is also helping out the serious photographers as well as us point-n-shoot’ers.
Interestingly the photos of the Selios layout taken by Dave Frary are actually not recent images at all. They are all taken from the archives.
I’ve been into photography for more years than I’d rather admit, and digital photography has really changed the way I take photos. When I was shooting color slides for possible magazine articles, the 36 exposure roll of Kodak Ektachrome 64T film would cost me around $25-27 with the processing. While I did duplicate some shots, mostly I didn’t. If a particular scene was important to what I was doing, I would leave it set up until the next day when I had the slides developed. If something was wrong, I’d have to shoot all over again.
Now with digital, I can shoot hundreds, thousands of photos and they don’t cost me anything. And if there is something minor wrong in an image, I can most of the time fix it in the computer rather than having to re-shoot it. Digital has really allowed photographers to shoot until they get exactly what they want, and see it instantly.
Fun so far!
Thats what was so telling… same source as the last Sellios layout article… but the end result is a much better printed image.
Whatever other faults the newer issues may have, image quality isn’t one of them.
Chris