The 'work' camera has been repaired...

The post below on the 'fun and games' that happened on the way to the Hobson's Bay exhibition came about due to my damaging my 'work' camera (the one I use to take photographs for AMRM). For the News section of the June and the Gallery and News sections of the August issue, which I am working on now, I had to revert to my 'old' camera. Luckily it was a pretty good camera and the images are still of acceptable quality (though I can tell the difference!), but with extremely good timing (the Thornleigh exhibition is next weekend), the 'work' camera arrived back from the repairer on Saturday.

Of course, I had to check it and re-set it to my preferred settings for model photography, plus the settings had to be checked. Ideally, the 'test' shots would have been of something I had recently photographed with the 'old' camera, so as to get a direct comparison. The logical model to use would have been 5303, which appears in a recent post, but 5303 is still at 'Geoff's Hospital' in Victoria, so I grabbed the next best thing...

This is my Mansfield brass model of 5184, as she appeared while allocated to Lithgow during the late 1950s - early 1960s. The locomotive has been given some extra detail (headlight glass and crew) as well as a front coupler. The tender is not the one that came with the loco (that tender is currently behind 5262), it is, in fact, a superdetailled FSM whitemetal kit, dating from the late 1970s. Older modellers may remember the FSM range of whitemetal kits, they were 'state of the art' in the late '70s and could be made up into quite a nice model, as can be seen from the tender above and 5303, further down the page. The range consisted of the 53 and 55 Standard Goods locos, 24 and 25 class Moguls and a 35 class 4-6-0. I have a 55 class kit tucked away, and had a 24 class running for a while in the early 1980s (it has been sitting in the showcase for about 20 years, about 75% of the way through an 'overhaul'). I wonder how many of them are still running...

Anyway, getting back to the subject of this post, it appears that the 'work' camera has been restored to full health!