Hi Y'all. Thanks for the good comments on Nate's layout and my photos of it. I've taken literally hundreds of photos of the Riverside area, and the Goodman farm on Nate's layout as I've worked on this scene about one day a week for the last several years. As everybody can see, it's nearing completion and it's looking pretty good.
For these shots, Nate had a vision in his head of what he wanted, and he set the shot up before I arrived with my Nikon D7000, remote release and tripod in hand. I shot several "stacks" of photos using available light, and combined them with the latest iteration of Helicon Focus (the pro version) for these results. The newest release produces less "fuzzing" around the edges of fine detail in my experience, which is a welcome improvement.
These photos have very minimal Photoshopping done to them, mainly getting rid of nail-heads in the ties (Nate, we need to just pull them out, eh?) and rail-joiners. The suggestion to 'shop in heat waves and appropriate exhaust smoke is something I also have thought about and I'll mess around with that this weekend and post the results if anything worthwhile happens.
My favorite shots for possible publication are #1 and #2, with a sentimental favorite going to the large, over-all view in photo #3. This section of Riverside was purposely made with a very broad cosmetic "photo" S-curve, much like John Armstrong's suggested ultra-broad cosmetic curves he'd design into his layouts specifically for taking photos of trains. The more complete the scene becomes, the more the concept is proving to be valid.
