 For this What's Neat this week, it's March. This show this month is all about photography. The weather is going to get good soon and I want to see everybody out shooting their models and submitting their photographs. At least submit something to Walters and get yourself a free Walters catalog next year. Columbach, model railroad hobbyists. There's plenty of outlets to sell your photographs. This month's video is nothing but photography. We have Chris Palameras come by. I spent 11 hours with him. We did a really nice photo shoot using some of his own models. Some of his weathering techniques he explains in a really nice interview. Mike Buddy comes by with some magnificent station wagons that he made out of a mini-medals Chevy model sedan. He turned it into a magnificent auto rack load of station wagons. Also there's three photo shoots this month. We do two sunrise shoots. One with the BLMA bridge, one with the atheron auto racks. And then I do a daytime shoot showing the fidelity and the detail of these gorgeous new models. These auto racks from atheron. So enjoy this March What's Neat This Week. That's your smile baby. It's cool. Right there? Yeah. Sun right now. Chris these are some pretty nice looking freight cars. Tell me this white one here. How did you get the effect on that? Well I mixed a little bit of acrylic paint with some chalk. And I got it nice and thick. And started dabbling it on just doing the big pot marks of rust. Let that dry. And then I went over it with more of an orangy brown. Just around the sides and did some streaks down. The gruffinis all just color pencil. It was pretty simple actually. Nice. Now this CSX car looks pretty hot. X New Hope and Ivy Lend. Yes how did you get that to look so good? Well I did a lot of airbrushing on this one. Most of the time I just used watercolors. But this one I chose to do a bunch of airbrushing. So I hit it with some olive. And then just started going at it with some jade green. With a double action airbrush. Kind of masking here and there. And then for some of the smaller patches I just painted a clear decal. And just put it on. Cut out the pieces and put them on. Nice work man. Thank you very much for sharing that freight car with us. For this segment of What's Neat This Week. I want to show you something I've always wanted to try to do with a photograph. And that's to do a snow shot with a Santa Fe. I've got a Santa Fe rotary snow plow here. I've got it powered up. And she's plowing the snow. And what I'm going to do is bring this into Photoshop. And I think I can make everything blur out just right during the shot. This is our moving diorama that we used for the DD-40 and Big Boy photographs. So I'm getting a lot of use out of this. A couple pine trees in the background to set up mountains. I've got a wire with cotton in it. And I know it doesn't look like much now. But the magic of Photoshop I think I can take everything and correct it. We should have a really good snow throwing shot right here. And now let me show you. This is how the snow rotary shot came out. And after Chris Palomeras worked on it a little bit, we ended up with a shot that a little bit of photo shopping and the shot came out just like this. I mean this is just as real as you'd want an HSK model to look. All the snow is flying just right. The clouds, the atmosphere. It's just a really great shot of an ather and rotary doing its job. And in fact we had the big blade spinning so that it would blur out just a little bit on film. So I'm happy with the way that this photograph came out. I want you to check out KenPatterson.com. And the reason for that this month is I've got a brand new two hour video. Two hours and 12 minute long download on building the Blackstone layout. This is the narrow gauge layout that I built where it originally started out as a simple product review for Blackstone models. Where we had a C19 locomotive that was simply supposed to be shot. And I needed to build a layout that would create a loop. And this loop layout after the photo shoot and this beautiful run by that we achieved from that shoot turned into an absolutely incredible construction article on building this layout. We were switching with leads, with yard passing tracks, all the scenery, all the wrapping of woodwork, the electrical work, the switches. Everything is in this two hour and 12 minute video download. Building the Blackstone layout at KenPatterson.com. Something else I want you guys to check out is the new HON30 annual came out. Chris Lane did a magnificent job this year in editing this book. It's full of articles, the thickest, biggest book that I've seen to date from them. And I've also got a good article in here on building the Lightner Trestle. That's bridge 160A on the Rio Grande Southern where Robert Richardson shot that famous snow shot of K27 number 464 plowing snow on one of its last revenue runs. And I recreated that photograph here in model form where we've captured all the glory of that shot in color. And there's an in-depth article in this year's HON30 annual 2014 where step-by-step through a lot of photographs, the process of building that scene is explained. One last thing I want to talk about is I shot my new Bachman cover this year. Just finish that up. That's my 120th cover in the industry so far. And what's exciting about this is the news that Bachman is announcing on the new Easy App Control System. People are saying in the industry that this may or may not replace DCC, but the fact is you turn on your handheld telephone device and it tells you what engines are on your layout and gives you the choice of running anything you want to run. So it sounds like some really fascinating technology and Bachman is on the cutting edge with this. So with that, enjoy the rest of this video, the What's Neat This Week for March. For this segment of What's Neat This Week, and this has become one of my more favorite segments, is when we have Mike Buddy come by with some really great models. Today he's come by with some Mini-Metal Works Chevy's, where he completely modified a sedan into a station wagon. Wait till you see what Mike's got to show us this week. Yeah, it's the classic Metal Works Mini-Metals, a 78 Chevy Impala, and they start out looking like this. Everybody's seen those before, but I converted one to a station wagon because I wanted to make some station wagons for my auto racks. I just did the work on the quarter panels and the roof out of styrene, and that's how it turned out. Then I made a rubber mold and cast a lot of them in resin. Just painted them different colors, as you can see on the auto racks. I cast my own wheels, too, from the same kit and made the tires look like some of them had white walls. So you rebuilt the whole insides. The whole rear is styrene. I see the inside panels for the door interiors of the car. Right. Then the bottom of it is just a flat chassis with the seats and the dashboard glued in there. I made a master of that. Then it fits together and it has a complete interior. The only thing it doesn't have is a steering wheel. It's absolutely incredible, Mike. Then I did the windows out of Scotch tape. The models are all finished in factory close colors, anyway. I tried to make them look like new cars being shipped with the manufacturer's stickers in the window. Most vehicles back then in the late 70s were shipped without wheel covers because they were stolen in the era of open auto racks. Billy just spent a little bit of time on painting them all and finishing them off with clear tape for the windows, Scotch tape. Man, Mike, this is like the best I've ever seen. The amount of work it took just to do the metal work to go from a sedan to a station wagon is revealing. Well, that's why I only wanted to do it one time. Right. I made a rubber mold and a resin cast, and it's something anybody can do. Mike, this is really cool, man. Thank you once again for just making us so impressed. See you next time. This is the part of the show where I get to share a really cool photo shoot with you. And today, well, you know, I want to cover something. Folks say it's the middle of wintertime, and this is your March or your February show, and you're showing springtime. You're showing warm weather. It's all glorious and beautiful outside. The fact is, the internet's global, and our show is global. So anytime it's wintertime in the country, in the United States, you know the Southern Hemisphere is enjoying a wonderful summer. Anyway, today's photo shoot really is something worth noting, and that is these beautiful athern auto racks that the UPS man just dropped off. I've been shooting these today, and the exquisite details on these freight cars are absolutely worth noting. These cars are so nice, I wouldn't even put loads in them. I mean, it's that nice a fidelity. These are plastic brass definition of the term, and they come in a multitude of road names. And these are just a few of them that I'm shooting at the moment right now, sitting up a nice yard shot. And I'm using Jeff Meyer's switch yard that we've used for multitude of ads, and if you look here, I'll show you the shot I'm trying to set up right now. Just a really nice sunny 1973 Springfield, Missouri Frisco shot. So we've got some really nice models to work with today. Beautiful morning to shoot some auto racks. See if we can't get the sun to just play through the finite posts that these models have. Maybe we'll get a good shot out of this. Let's see what happens with this shot. Well, I know I got the sunrise shot. I've already done that. Now I'm just kind of walking around and get some really interesting photographs of Mike's Buicks and these athern auto racks. Just to see if I can't get some decent product shots with the sun that we have right now. Let's see what happens. It's about 15 minutes before sunrise, and for this segment of What's Neat This Week, I got a bit of a trick up my sleeve. But first, if you look, the bridge is missing out of the scene here. There's a good reason for that. But while it's gone, let's talk about something else. John Palackie creates a beautiful brass bridge that I think would complement itself right here in this location. It's just an incredible looking model, all brass. You put it together with super glue. And the instruction book itself is just, it's an article unto itself. And the brass etchings are just something exquisite to look at. It looks like all the hard parts already been done for you. All you've got to do is just spend some time and a lot of repetition. But now why is the bridge missing? The bridge is missing because in about 10 minutes we're going to do a BLMA sunrise photo shoot, which I've spent an all nighter working on projects. So it's just perfectly set up now. And I've got enough cloud deck here where if I get reflection during the sunrise off the clouds and the water, this should turn out to be just an absolutely spectacular photograph. So hang tight and let's see how this one turns out. Well, I can tell you we're getting really close. Now let me explain something. What you've got to do in a shot like this is when you've got the sun coming straight at you with hot light, you've got to reflect light back onto the backside of the bridge. And so normally I'll use a foam reflector to do that. But while the sun hasn't come up yet and the light is very low, I'm experimenting with one of these bar lights while I shoot the shot just to feather a little bit more light just to just make the details a little bit more distinct in the photograph. So we're getting really close now. Generally right before the sunrise within nine minutes before the sunrise you get great reflection if there's any clouds. And that's what I'm anticipating with today's semi-cloudy sky. And then when the sun just breaks the horizon it's generally hot underneath the cloud deck and that's when we should get a good reflection shot. Here we are. This is the best we're going to get today. I'm shooting exposures right now just at one second. The results are decent considering the light we've got to work with right now. I'm going to start using the reflector and reflecting light onto this. Continue shooting. I just want to reflect as much light as possible onto the scene. So that the bridge... I'm going to paint this bridge silver after this photo shoot. Look at that. Here we go baby. This is what we're looking for right here. This is my... This is great. I'm not even reflecting and I need to get back on the reflector here. You're live with me during a shoot right now and this is how I do it. This is how we make our nickels. This is just exquisite at the moment. I'm going to lower my camera for just a little more water reflection. Up to the sky we go. A little different position here. This is just the way it works. A few minutes and three minutes it's done. Focusing on the bridge. I'm letting my depth of field take care of the rest. Checking my exposures. Look at that. That's magic. And that's how you do that.