Who are we?
I am the "we" here at Stevens Creek Models. No, my name is not Steven. My company takes its name from the creek located about a block from where I live in Cupertino, California. My name is Ken Lunders.
I have been model railroading since around 1997. About that time I wandered into a hobby shop and found an issue of RMC I had to buy & take home. I joined the NMRA soon after. A couple of years later I took on the Pacific Coast Region job of Contest Chairman following Tony Thompson's tenure. I held that position for about 4 years. After making the Region's rule book (Contest Directory) electronically accessible on the web, and accomplishing most of the rest of what I wanted, I vacated the job to become a plain old member once again.
I hooked up with other modelers in the area and helped put together the 2004 National Narrow Gauge Convention in Santa Clara. I organized the contest room, and designed and maintained the convention web site. I was also lucky to be a part of the Yosemite Short Line On30 sectional layout group. We built the layout to show at the convention. You can see more about the layout & group here on the web page created by Jim Eckman.
Like many model railroaders, I think model building is one of the funner parts of the hobby. I try to make my kits both enjoyable and challenging to build. I hope you will try one before they are all gone. I will be closing the kit portion of the business soon. It is no longer fun to spend time behind a computer doing drawings, and running around trying to get parts for the kits. I'd rather be building them!
Another hobby of mine is photography. The picture at the top of the page is a self portrait I created for a contest. I call it "Photograme" (pronounced pho-TOG-ra-me). I may not win, but it is fun to participate. I took the photo with my Nikon D80 camera mounted with a Nikkor 28-105mm macro zoom lens. About 5 minutes work in Photoshop using the Topaz Adjust 4.0 plug-in gave the photo its unusual look.
We recently went on trip to Death Valley National Park: One of my favorites. We were away for most of a week. One thing about the desert is that you never can know for certain what kind of weather you'll have. Even though it was February, we had 80 degree heat in the valley at times, and windy cold evenings higher up that had me wearing a down parka over my fleece jacket. No rain, though it threatened. We had a dust & sand storm in the valley instead. Anyway, it was fun and we had a GREAT time. If you have the opportunity to go, don't pass it up! Naturally, I took lots of photos and selected 78 for you to look at if you like. Here is a sample:
The rest can be seen on the web here in an album, or here as a slide show. The links will open in new windows.
To find out more about Nikon, Cannon, and other cameras visit Ken Rockwell's web site here. Have a giant grain of salt ready. He is very opinionated, but the tech info is pretty good.
If you got here from some place other than the Stevens Creek Models link, click here to get there.
Thanks for visiting.
