wefalck

I posted all the photos I had in the thread by 'bruce d' that prompted this project:

Real boatbuilding in miniature 👍 BTW, that chisel in the previous picture looks very precision-ground, is is carbide ?

Talking about switches, I saw a guy on YouTube, who controls his machines from the smartphone or devices/services, such as Alexa/Siri (Homepod). Not sure what happens, if the WiFi cuts out. I am using momentary foot-switches on all my machines.

Greg, your fears might be justified by all what I heard the director saying ... bizarre for a museum that is essentially funded by the French Defence Ministry to forget about its naval history and to develop into an 'Ocean' museum. Never let 'professional' museum educators their hands on technical museums or they will be doomed. I trust, however, that NEPTUNIA will keep up its standards. We, that is the German equivalent of the NRG, also exchange articles with them to reach out to a broader audience, who might not speak so well (or at all) the other language(s).

The material as such is not important, but what they look like in the end. Plastics or metal can be made looking like wood with the right painting technique. Sometimes plastics can be a better choice than woodt, particularly when one does not have access to very fine-grained hardwood. I noticed on your deadeyes that they do not have the grooves that leads the lanyard smoothly out of the bores. If it all possible, you should file this in. It will look a lot better.

I got a life-time supply via ebay - sometimes suppliers/hospitals etc. sell off blades cheaply in their original packages of 100, when the best before date for the sterilisation has expired and they cannot be used any more in a medical context.

There are not shipmodelling, railway modelling, figure modelling etc. techniques, there are techniques for particular tasks that can be applied here and there, as the need arises

For priming/filling wood I use a nitrocellulose base product (German brand Clou). It often suffices, when a satin finish is required, the second being rubbed down with 0000 steel-wool. Can be polished to a higher sheen with e.g. felt polish wheels - almost invisible coating. For high-gloss finishes bleached or unbleached shellac solution, either ready made (by Clou) or dissolved as flakes in denatured alcohol for special applications - can be used as cement (as watchmakers traditionally do). The traditional varnish to prevent silver and brass from tarnishing is 'zapon varnish'. I use it also for various other applications, where I need a fast drying almost invisible varnish, e.g. for stiffening ropes or securing knots. Can be softened again with a drop of acetone. These days I normally apply paint with the airbrush, only details, figurines and the likes are treated with a normal brush. Being a 'miniaturist', I only need minute quantities of paint any time, as mixing up such small quantities for air-brushing is difficult, I prefer them readily conditioned for air-brushing - saves a lot of time and trouble and the branded products seem to keep for decades. I also use these diluted paints for washings. I only use acrylics in the airbrush to facilitate cleaning and not to have to mess around with solvents. Long-established artist's paint suppliers have a reputation to loose, so their products are likely to be of good and reliable quality. The brands I am typically using are Schmincke (German), Vallejo (in France they are labelled Prince August), and Winsor & Newton. If at all possible, I apply the acrylics without primer. Brass and copper can be difficult due to the slightly hydrophobic oxides that form on them. If possible, polish the surface or apply e.g. zapon varnish as primer if needed. Of course, in the past I extensively used Humbrol paints, but as noted above, I do not like to airbrush solvent-based paints. For figure-painting I sometimes used artist's oils in the past, but find that I can get similar results with washes of acrylics for airbrushing that have been further diluted.

'Red ochre' is iron-oxyhydroxide (FeOOH), depending on the amount of crystal water and the purity of the material, it can be actually anything from a pretty bright red to a dark brown. Dark brown would be ok (in some navies the cast-iron guns were made to corrode with vinegar and the resulting mixture of iron-acetate and iron-oxyhydroxide solidified in situ by rubbing the gun with line-seed oil), but a red gun would show stains from powder-smoke and the powder-slime from washing out the guns all over. There is a good reason, why guns were painted dark.

The armies all over Europe used gangs of 'recruiters', who worked like press gangs. So one should assume that the respective navies did so as well in times of need.

Challenge well mastered !

The shackle looks nice as well ! I meant this kind of saw blade: https://www.ebay.de/itm/201975383662?hash=item2f06abc66e:g:GC4AAOSw-29ZWxFd It is sold by the metre in various diameters from 0.26 mm upward for fretsaw work on semi-precious stones. They are not cheap though, 8€ to 10€ the metre, but you can hold it in an (older, as diamond may mar the jaws) pin-vise.

Mostly overlooked by modellers, but the shipwrights and boatbuilders of old took great care and pride in finishing their work, running down a moulding-plane here and there. It also had the practical purpose of rounding off edges to prevent splintering. Not easy to reproduce below certain scale, which is probably the reason, why it is rarely reproduced by us modellers.

As I said above, solved mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

With e.g. Photoshop you can get rid of the background: ... o.k. it bit more fine-tuning would be needed for the shadows underneath the stand.

I know these rabbit holes all too well ... Looking good the blocks, so the tumbler works. If you have a file fine enough, or some diamond-coated round fret-saw blade or a very sharp chisel, I would round off the edges of the holes to simulate the sheaves. It looks better, when the ropes don't come out of the holes with a sharp bend.

I gather you scrape off any glue squirting out while it is still wet - hence also the wetting brush ? What kind of chisels do you use ?

Re. sliding stones: I vaguely remember that there was a paper in Nature on it in the early 1990s and in the meantime they have hit Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones Agree, there are striking images on that photographer's Web-site. I gather, if you live by it, it needs a fair bit of self-promotion ... lots of competitors.

Yes, one can 'point' the focal point on my iPhone SE too, but that is not enough, one needs to put a particular element on the object into focus and then you are dependent on how the autofocus reacts to the object's area. For image-stacking one would need to move the focal plane step by step through the object and this you can really only do with a manual focus ring. In the house, including my workshop, we have gone virtually completely LED now, mainly filament bulbs. In the workshop I installed an indoor LED floodlight over the workbench and have a moveable architect's lamp with a strong LED bulb in it. The colour temperature of illumination in a workshop can be quite an ideological matter among modellers. Some people go to great lengths to install 'day-light' (5500 K) illumination in their workshop, paint walls bright white etc. Personally, I wouldn't like the hospital feeling. My models typically would be seen with artificial light, rather than in bright day-light, so I rather would go for something that looks good under 3600 K. With the possibility to set the way how the camera interprets the light or to adjust the light temperature in Photoshop et al., the colour temperature of the illuminating light is also not so critical anymore, compared to the days of film. 'Warm' LEDs, however, are about 10% less efficient than 'cold' LEDs, because the yellow filter that is painted on them absorbs some of the light. One thing to avoid, if possible, is to mix sources of light of different colour temperature, because the resulting (local) colour tinting is difficult to correct.

True, but modern cameras, or rather the software built into them, comes with so many bells and whistles that I tend to forget many of them. My philosophy has been, since I went digital, to shoot 'neutral' images as a starting point for post-processing. So, I am mostly not using any of those built-in exposure-correction programs. However, if there is a risk of underexposure in the shadows or overexposure in the highlights, I would try to adjust this with selective metering etc. As I said above, if the pixels don't have any other information but black or white, there is not much scope for post-processing. Talking about post-processing, a feature in Photoshop I am using frequently is the geometry correction. In the old days one would have called this Scheimpflug-correction of converging lines. Some studio cameras have the possibility to shift and tilt the lens and one can do this also in the darkroom. Now it is easy to correct distortions digitally, but one has to be aware that it degrades the image to some extent. However, pictures look so much more professional, if lines that are vertical also appear so on the image. I also use this e.g. in museum shots, when I have to take an oblique position to avoid reflections from surfaces of paintings or glass cases. I inherited from my father a Nikon lens in which the actual lens can be moved sideways by a few millimeters to give you a greater depth of field, when taking oblique shots. This is useful for table-top photography. However, I am not using it very often, as it pre-dates the digital age and does not transmit the lens data to the camera body. Much of this serves to work around sub-optimal photography situations. A professional, of course, would take the time and has the resources to make lighting and other arrangements. As amateurs we mostly cannot do this, unless we work in our own 'studio'. Another point of DSLR vs. iPhone: on the DSLR you can switch to manual focus and set the focal plane to where you really want it to be, tweaking the autofocus on a smartphone is difficult to impossible.

Not sure, how much of it actually is genuine 'tongue in the cheek'. There is a lot of tech-stuff that is likely to frighten off many people (or perhaps sends them to Wikipedia et al.) and he keeps telling people that you need the artistic vibrations, which kind of belittles other people's work. There is also 'advice' on his site that in principle is correct (say on shadows and highlights), but virtually impossible to put into practice unless you have a crew assistants around and a van full of equipment or work in your studio. Yes, I like the clarity and vibrance of his shots from the SW USA - but then unlike Scotland and here in Paris, the area is bloody dry with not that much haze in the air. But then luminance and vibrance and strong colours is not everything. He claims that the vibrance is due to film he used, but I am quite sure that some post-processing was done on the images on the Web-site or on the newer shots in the camera settings. Photoshop, even in the amateur edition as 'Elements', is quite powerful. The tweaking one did in the darkroom can be done now with visualising immediately the results - I had been waiting for that for decades. Of course, if a pixel is black (dead shadow) or white (burnt out high-light) there is not much room for tweaking. Anyway, we are veering off the subject, which is not the critising of a particular photographer, but getting better studio shots of our models. BTW, if you are interested, here are my own modest attempts: https://www.imago-orbis.org

Is there still a strake/wale to go on now ? I am wondering, because the transom stern-post seem to be above the level of the frames.

Yes, of course, I am shooting in RAW only. With post-processing a lot of the contrast problems can be compensated for, but even with the various program options and selective metering etc. I don't seem to able to shoot high-contrast images, such as a moon at night for instance. The iPhone seems to do this without tweaking ...

Just wondering, whether it wouldn't be easier to put the stanchions on first and then push them down into their holes one by one. Some stiff steel or molybdenum wire might help as well.

When I started my photography life in the early 1970s, I was lucky that my school organised a practical course with a local photography club, where we learned the basics of b/w processing and the basics of photography in general. I also read a couple of technical books back then, my father had. The school had a darkroom for the pupils' use and I got the equipment to process films at home. Never got into colour processing and printing, using only slide-film - for the last 25 years of analogue photography I used Fuji Sensia 100. Eventually got a slide scanner and Photoshop, but when camera sensors became big enough to allow A4-sized prints, I went fully digital in 2006. Digital image processing allowed me to do all the things I always wanted to do to my slides. Just looked over this Ken Rockwell's Web-site. The guy seems to have his nose pretty much up in the air and he prides himself being an 'artist', I feel. His pictures are colourful, but not that much more. I am currently using a Nikon D5100 DSLR, but find that it handles stark contrasts less well than my iPhone SE, in spite of all the buttons you can turn. That's one of the reasons, why I am using the iPhone for workshop pictures, where I don't have much options to control the illumination. Rockwell seems to use a lot long exposure shots, up to 1 min of exposure time or so. His films must be pretty good not to suffer from the Schwartzschild-effect. Nowadays you can ramp up the sensitivity, but then you end up with 'white noise'. Still, for workshop-shots I often go up to ISO 3600 - you can eliminate it in Photoshop sufficiently for posting work-in-progress pictures in fora.