No one has started it yet, so I thought I would!!! Plus I have to go to work [banghead].
Just a rusted up Rock hopper.
I’ve build a loading chute for my stock yard.
Wolfgang
Great weathering, Robby. Wolfgang, excellent modeling of that chute.
Pennsy EMD’s in the yard. DJ.
A friend sent this link to a great model railroad, The Coast Line RR. He ia a Danish artist living in Sweden who is modeling Maine narrow gage in On30. The water modeling is increadible, look for a video link near the bottom of the first page
http://coastline.no13.se/
Today’s switcher in E-Street Yard
Way cool !!!
Really nice work Wolfgang
Do you plan to darken the tops of the posts ?
Yes, I did so. But I’m still working with this.
Wolfgang
Great start to the weekend, guys. I always look forward to this thread.
Not much has been happening on my end. Did finally finish a building project that had been languishing
And just for funsies, since this is weekend photo fun…
Jim
I finally got my new Athearn F59-PHI back from the DCC installer yesterday!! Now I have an official Amtrak consist!!!
Picking up passengers at Denver Union Station
And I started planting trees on the mountain tunnel…(I will have the new backdrop in by next week)
Wolfgang, your work is excellent, if you don’t my my saying so. Nice cattle chute you have there. [8D]
I had to buy a new flat panel monitor near Christmas, and it is a very wide one that seems to distort all my images unless I crop them to the same aspect ratio. It is disconcerting because I take care to get decent focus in my images, at least as well as an automatic point and shoot can do. However, I learned of a programme that stacks several shots with different depths of focus (not Helicon, but a freeware called CombineZM) and I played with it for the first time last night. I have just forgotten about how the single images look and relied, or trusted, on the camera to get it right. But, with CZM I can actually improve the entire focal range.
Here is the first image I feel I can display. It comprises a stack of three images, all aimed to about the same angle, but with different foci. It shows a UP 2-10-2 that broke down near Seneca. The shop foreman at Seneca agreed to fix it for the UP. Billable, of course. It is ready to roll, and is being shunted across the turntable to a holding radial track.
-Crandell
Thank you, Crandell.
I’ve used CombineZM too. It’s a good tool. This way you get pictures like with the prototype. You have only to cut off the frame. [:)]
Wolfgang
Wow! that is a fantastic pic Crandell. As far as your resolution issues, do you have a dedicated graphics card in your computer? (desktop?) What resolution are your settings?
If you don’t have a graphics card, I would suggest to get one, they’re cheap.
If you have a PCI slot then here is one for less than $80 Video Card
Or if you have a newer desktop with a PCI-Express slot here’s another card for you. Video Card PCI-E
Very easy to install, and supports widescreen high resolutions up to 1920x1200.
Been a while since I posted here! I ordered some stuff from modeltrainstuff.com (MB Klein) on Tuesday Australian and received it yesterday (friday) cool! I got a couple of Kato locomotives, a three pack of ExactRail Trinity hoppers and two Maxi IV sets by Kato. The ExactRail hoppers are very nice! Kato Dash 9 
Kato SD70ACe 
One of the ExactRail hoppers 
Well cars 
Might have to order more, soon. [;)]
Crandell:
Go to “control panel” and look for “display settings” Change the settings to the settings needed for your new monitor.
The monitor may have come with a software disk if needed. You don’t always need it.
Dave
Thanks, fellas, for your thoughtful and helpful replies. The graphics cards and other stuff is all Greek to me, but it is worth doing some fact-finding and asking around locally to see if I need something besides just plugging in the new monitor.
One would think that everything else would look fuzzy or skewed, such as graphics on this page, other pictures posted…but they are all sharp and IE8 fills the screen nicely…although with wide olive green bands to the sides of this column and the column of ads at the right. But I’m guessing IE8 and Fire Fox must have this all built in. Also, my image manipulation software consists of two others, and only the one seems to show fuzzy images…regretfully, and that’s FastStone. Sagelight, which I have also acquired just recently, doesn’t seem to suffer from the problems that FastStone does. Maybe the settings do need some tweaking.
Thanks again for the tips…I’ll take 'em and run with them over the next few days. [:)]
-Crandell
Settings for display are 1600 X 900, and I have an NVIDEA GeForce FX 5200 that must be five or more years old by now.
Think of it like this, web pages can be compared to older tv shows which were made in the 4:3 aspect ratio. If you’re using a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor, you’re going to get the enlarged columns on either side of the main image. There isn’t much you can do to fix that other than to stretch the image, but doing that will probably distort images, text, and such. The true fix for this “problem” would be for websites to be made in a 16:9 aspect ratio in order to fill the widescreen monitors, just like HD shows have done for widescreen televisions.
What Tony said. You’re graphics card and settings seems fine.
That’s one very cool billboard !