Getting Ready for NER Albany

I have put aside some of the layout work for now as I prepare my clinic for the NER Fall Convention, Commodore Vanderbilt, in Albany, NY this Oct. 18-21. I am adapting a past clinic where I looked at the railroads of Northern New England through slides by me and my late friend Glenn Salvatore. I am expanding the clinic to include adapting the prototype into a layout and looking at my layout's design and construction. I hope to share information the railroads of the VT and NH area, circa 1980, and show some layout design concepts that others can take home and use when building their layout (New England based or not).

One key difference between the clinics is that I will not be using a slide projector, but instead a laptop to do the presenation. I then had the problem of how to best convert some of the 120 slides from the first clinic into digital form so I could paste them into my presentation. I tried scanning them, but that was just too time consuming and the quality was not real great.

So instead I opted to set up the slide projector and display the slides onto a screen. Then I set up my digital camera to take shots of the projected image, turning them into digital photos. Pretty quick and painless and the results are pretty good. Here is a shot of me going through that process:

I'll have to put up another post later to let you know how the clinic and convention went. After the convention, I have an open house set for November 17th, so work on the layout will be back in full swing. That should lead to some more posts with construction updates.