An example of an "in-camera" image. 

A tribute to the New York Central and Artist Leslie Ragan who painted The 20th Century Limited on the Historic Water Level Route in 1945.

 This is actually 6 separate exposures on one 35mm Ektachome Slide. There is no retouching or post-production editing. From foreground to background is 18", the width is 24". The locomotive is an HO  Riverossi NYC Streamlined Hudson, The barely visible house on the far bank of the Hudson River is a Hotel from an old Monopoly board game with a window drilled out and lit. The mountains are black paper. The stars are pinholes in the gray paper sky. The smoke and steam are cotton attached to a wire coat hanger and moved around during one of the 6 exposures.  The low angle and deep Depth of Field add to the illusion that we are looking at a real train. The slight out of focus tree in the right foreground and the top of the mountain in the far left background don't detract from the illusion. It took 3 weeks and over 100 test shots to create this image. 

 This became my most published photograph. Chosen by Kalmbach Publishing for Model Railroader Magazine 1987 1st Place photo contest centerfold and later an Art of Model Railroad Photography Calendar December 1990 picture, other advertising and Christmas cards. Most recently the TCA chose it for their first wrap-around cover for the Winter 2017 Train Collectors Quarterly. 

 These images are all digital and were all edited using GIMP.

The USMRR O Scale train was created and donated to Steam Into History for use as a fundraiser.  

They own and operate  the Full Size 4-4-0 American built by Kloke Locomotive Works on the left in New Freedom PA over the Northern Central Railroad. The 3 Rail Lionel 4-4-0 on the right is O Gauge. If you look close, you can see the imperfect blending of the two images and the adding of the engineer into the Lionel cab. The "scale image", "clone", "heal" "sharpen" and "color balance" features of GIMP were used to blend the 2 images. 

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Created as a Christmas present for my wife to commemorate the 10th Anniversary  of her spa

 Body & Sole Reflexology in Lancaster PA, The Body & Sole Train combines a "flipped" farm field to hide the foreground benchwork and the house in the left rear.

 Along with portable benchwork, which allows you to select the backgrounds you want; a tripod, reflector cards, kitty litter for ballast, a wide angle lens and digital SLR let you go outside the limits of your home railroad.    

Both the USMRR and Body & Sole Train ran as feature articles in issues of Train Collectors Quarterly

All images on this page (c) Harold Walters