Photoshoppery and Distortion

Images taken today on digital cameras are almost fool proof. Stick the camera on auto mode then point and click. Its as simple as that, however things weren't always so. You only have to look back at images from the pre digital age and you see a huge amount of photos that are exposed to the wrong levels or have incorrect white balancing etc. Even today if you do take a photo slightly wrong i.e colour, exposure etc it can be largely sorted out on photoshop particularly if you are shooting in RAW format.

After looking through my photos that i have taken over the last couple of weeks i began to wonder what level or realism could be achieved with a bit of editing. Having seen others putting smoke onto their steam locos etc i decided to give it a go. Here are the results....

More images can be found on my Flickr

Im off out now but hopefully the images arent too bad!

Getting Steamy

Hello all.

After a few weeks of largely weathering diesels and wagons i decided to have a week of trying something different..... some steam. I have a few steam engines turning up in the post over the next few days for weathering commisions so i thought it would be good to get some of my own weathered after not doing any for a month or so. Im not old enough to have ever steam in real life so when it comes to weathering these locos photographs become all the more important. Flickr is a brilliant source for this as are old Steam World magazines i have lying around. There are many millions of steam photos out there but colour ones are slightly harder to find. Obviously colour is vital to what we are trying to achieve so you need to be able to see the colour variations.... even if alot of the old photos do have a magenta tint to them. (Which gives me a little idea but thats for another post!)

Weathering steam locos that are BR black and green is something i have alot of experience in but when it comes to pre nationalisation locos im slightly less well versed. Its also a case that as these locos were far better looked after the weathering needs to be far more subtle. Using a selection of different colours all carefully airbrushed, combined with other techniques, the results below hopefully show what can be achieved... from end of steam limescale, rust and soot build up to the more everyday appearance of the LNER locos. Ive only put a few photos on here but more photos can be found on my Flickr site or The Weathering Works website... theweatheringworks.co.uk

P.s... shameless plug but lets face it thats what this blog is for...the above locos along with many others are available to buy via my ebay site... http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Weathering-Works