In the past couple of months I’ve gotten to know some of the local photographer crowd via some Portland Flickr gatherings (pdx Flickr group). Last week, I happened to see some railroad photography on my Flickr contacts page, but it wasn’t from the normal railfan sources. I asked Jennifer and Ryan if they’d allow me to share their take on railroad photography here and they both agreed. And thus I present a couple of photos of the BNSF in the Gorge. If you click on the photo you can view it larger on their Flickr pages (or browse their other work):

by reesman9

by jasmine008

 ”An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”

                                                              - Nina Simone

I hear from my friends how things have changed and “its just not like it used to be”.   Having photographed trains regularly for over 20 years I completely agree.   Does the fact that things aren’t like they used to be lessen my motivation to photograph and document what’s going on today?  No, not at all.  Sure, I am saddened my favorite subject of the past no longer exists, but since I still enjoy trains and railroad photography so I adapt and find a new interest.  Those basic motivations keep me out there reflecting the times.

Railroadforums.com is running an advanced contest this month on Creative High Contrast B&W.  I won’t claim to be an expert in this topic but for some reason the bug bit me and I spent some time editing a bunch of photos in Lightroom yesterday afternoon.  Whoops, there went an hour and a half!  Still it was a rewarding experience and I found a few old images that would work for the contest had they been taken in May of 2008.

With the demise of the Weyerhaeuser log train last Wednesday I thought this would be an appropriate topic.

The Cascades.  This is re-edit of an image I took in March.

When I originally started the conversion from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Lightroom I ran into a pretty big snag.  The snag was the captions from RAW images were not transferring into Lightroom when I used the Import from Elements feature.  Everything else imported just fine but not having my captions concerned me.

Since my January 1 attempt I’ve contemplated several workarounds to get the captions over.  My ideas were (in order of feasibility):

1.  Export the captions from Organizer and copy and paste them on each image in Lightroom
2.  Export the captions from Organizer and build .xmp sidecar files that could be read into Lightroom
3.  Wait until a later version of Lightroom and hope that caption transfer would be added
4.  Ignore the missing captions

I ruled out option 4 because I value my captions too much.  Option 3 was the plan I went with for some time but not having my catalog in Lightroom was becoming more and more difficult (mainly due to an import issue that raised its head in March).  That left me with options 1 & 2.

I experimented quite a bit with option 2 as it would make the caption import mechanical and eliminate potential errors.  I have been using Lightroom since the first Windows betas in June of 2006 so I had quite a few images that I’d edited already.  Those edits are valuable just like the captions and I wanted to make sure they were included in my new Railroad catalog.  To do this I wrote out .xmp sidecars containing the edit information.   Now I have a dilemma, some files would have two sidecar files.  That won’t work because Lightroom reads in the data in the sidecar file as a replacement for the data it has in the library.  This means when you read the side car file Lightroom overlays all the information on the image.  With two files I’d either get the edits or I’d get the captions but not both.  As much as I hated it, option 1 proved to be the most fool proof and accurate way of getting my captions into Lightroom.

The conversion 

After much grumbling about copy and paste I decided to make the leap and convert the catalog knowing I’d have a copy and paste job ahead.   Here’s the steps I performed to prepare.

In Organizer:

1.  I used the Write Tag Info to files feature to write what information I could to my image files.  This put the caption on about 1350 of my images that were originally .jpg, .tiff, or. psd
2.  I reconnected all missing files to make sure Organizer knew the location of all the images
3.  I recovered the catalog to compress it and make sure it is ready for Lightroom

In Lightroom:

1.  I selected all the images in the Library grid and went to the Metadata menu and chose Save Metadata to files (this is my ‘working’ catalog that did not contain any keywords, captions or anything, just edits).  This saved all the edits I’d made in Lightroom to xmp sidecar files
2.  I created a new catalog and chose Import from Elements.   This started the import process from my Organizer catalog

In less than an hour I had a Lightroom catalog minus captions from about 7950 images.

The clean up

The conversion process wasn’t perfect and I had many duplicate keywords.  As near as I could tell if an image was in a version set in Organizer the keywords were duplicated, one within the keyword hierarchy and one at the root of the hierarchy.  I checked several out and they were truly duplicates so all I had to do was remove the keywords that were not in the hierarchy and the keywords would all be correct.

As a double check that all of my photos were converted I went to each folder and imported all files from the folder.  I found about a dozen images that were not in organizer and thus were not converted to Lightroom.  In the end I wasn’t missing anything valuable, but it was nice to know everything had converted.

The clean up took between 3 and 4 hours total.

The captions

Thanks to Paige’s comments on the previous post I knew that the Organizer file could be opened by MS Access.  I decided to extract the captions from there into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of entry.  This is the query I used.

SELECT ImageTable.fImageOriginalFilePath,
       ImageTable.fImageOriginalFileName,
       ImageTable.fImageDate,
       ImageTable.fImageTime,
       MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaption,
       ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaption  FROM (ImageTable LEFT JOIN ImageLongCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fImageLongCaptionIdFromImage = ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaptionId)
                 LEFT JOIN MediaShortCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fMediaShortCaptionIdFromMedia = MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaptionId;

The results of this query were exported into Excel where I combined the short and long captions (I used both over the years) into one caption giving me something that looked like this:

The copy and paste

In both Lightroom and Excel I ordered the images by file name and went after it one image at a time.  What I quickly discovered is I tended to give blocks of images the same caption.  When you have a DSLR and blast off 10 images of the same train there really isn’t much different information from one image to the next.  I found I could apply the same caption to a block of images by selecting all the images in Lightroom and then pasting in the caption.  For example if you look at the Excel screen shot above you can see IMG_2347.CR2 - IMG_2350_edited-1.psd all have the same caption.  Instead of copying and pasting 7 times I can finish these images with just one copy and paste. 

In the end I captioned over 1000 images and hour.  With just under 7000 to caption that worked out to between 6 and 7 hours worth of effort.  I spread the effort out in small pieces so as to not kill myself.  I also intentionally didn’t set a deadline to complete this because with my personality if I did that I’d have to find some way to get it done before the deadline which would likely translate into some late night marathon.  

The reward

I’m now working exclusively in Lightroom and I don’t have any more copy and paste to do!  As nasty as it sounds the copy and paste wasn’t really that bad.  My decision to to a little here and there really made the job go quickly and took away the monotony that comes with a repetitive task.   Now that the hard work is over I can sit back and enjoy having a complete Lightroom catalog of my railroad photos.

Are you having trouble figuring out which of the Adobe Photoshop products are right for you?  Check out Scott Kelby’s discussion on his blog.  Regular readers of my posts on Lightroom will not be surprised by Scott’s conclusions. 

Even if you don’t agree with Scott I hope you can get a better feel from Scott’s post on where the main photo editing products from Adobe fit in.

…well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.  Like most of Washington we had a touch of April snow in Vancouver yesterday.  After one of the showers I ran out and snapped a photo of my lone remaining Daffodil.  The poor thing I’m sure it was second guessing its decision to bloom.

Snowy Daffodil

Yacolt is at a bit higher elevation than my house so of course it way snowing up there and yes, that’s snow on the hills above the BYCX 1.  Certainly snow is expected up there in January, but not in April.  Dare I ask what’s next?

Cold Excursion

April 20 marks seven years for me of using a digital camera to capture railfan photos.   Seven years seems like an odd milestone doesn’t it?  As I thought this through I realized seven years represents about one third of the time I’ve photographed trains.  When you do something the same way one third of the time you get used to it and it becomes natural.

The morning of April 21, 2001 was quite busy on the Lakeside Sub.  The plethora of trains would later come in handy for the 700 and crew.

I purchased a Kodak DC4800 3.1MP camera as a Christmas present for my wife in November of 2000.  After Christmas I used the camera a little bit for railfanning around Vancouver but I hadn’t yet taken it on a week long trip.  I stole the camera away from her for my trip to Spokane and back to chase the ill-fated Homecoming Excursion.   With that bit of thievery this trip became my first time using digital to capture railroad images on a road trip.

April 22, 2001.  Still on the rails.  This day would be the last relatively good day of the excursion.

What did I think?  Well, unlike some, I didn’t waffle back and forth between film and digital.  My experience on this trip convinced me digital is where it is.   Despite being a point and shoot, the 3.1 MP camera did a fine job and captured some great memories for me.  Its ease of use, instant feedback, and ability to correct photos really sold me!   On top of that I was still used to prints so I did print some photos…but only the ones I felt were worth the cost.   These advantages were too great to ignore and I never looked back. 

Seven years later digital imaging seems so natural that I feel like I’ve been doing it all my life.

Yesterday Vancouver had a surprise foreign visitor, KCS 4100 which I believe is the class unit of their SD70ACe series in the newer Heritage paint scheme. It was the trailing unit on a westbound train at 8th street (in some amazingly craptastical lighting… but you take what you can get, right?).

Recently I went about town for some photo taking opportunities and managed to grab a few decent shots of a Portland & Western freight rolling on through Union Station downtown. It’s been gorgeous the last few days and I just figured that at least a few trains ought to be photographed.

On Saturday April 5 I made another one day trip to BNSF’s Oregon Trunk sub hoping to again capture some of the detouring UP trains.  Unlike my previous trip this time I was bound for Madras with the focus on the South Jct. to Crooked River segment.   I knew the places I wanted to visit but I really didn’t have a plan of which one I’d hit first.  I just headed towards Madras to see what happened.

As I left Warm Springs I heard the UP 8619 N get a box 7 (after the arrival of) with the BNSF 7644 S at the North Siding Switch Paxton.  A meet!   I headed for Paxton and started off with the Z-LCBR meeting the M-VAWRRB in some decent morning glow.  At this point I was faced with a choice of which train to chase.  Given its unusual for the LCBR to be on the Trunk I chased it north.  That proved profitable since a meet was set up with the UP 5355 S  (M-EURVB) at South Jct. 

Clawing into Paxton

Between Gateway and South Jct. the route drops into the Mud Springs Creek and Trout Creek canyons.  Both of these canyons are neatly carved out of the lava rock and provide the railroad a route to gain some elevation as it climbs out of the Deschutes canyon toward Madras.  Like other parts of the Trunk this part doesn’t lack for scenery!  I think the most fascinating part is a horseshoe curve that nearly turns the train 180 degrees!  The UP 5355 S proceeded to Opal City for a meet with another northbound UP manifest (M-RVPT).

Trout Creek Horseshoe

By the time I photographed the M-RVPT passing through the horseshoe the light was about right for the traditional Trout Creek trestle photo.  Since everyone has seen that photo many times I’ll share some others from this fantastic location.  As I was standing on the hillside above the trestle waiting for the M-PASKLF, I thought to myself how little fun it would be to stand on that hill on a hot August day.  I’m thinking the spring and fall would be best for the Trunk.

Grand Canyon of the Deschutes

Trout Creek

I chased the BNSF 7622 S down to the Crooked River bridge and captured the usual side shot there.  As the day wore on more and more clouds streamed over Cascades into the high desert so by the time the photo was taken the sky and lighting were quite diffused leaving things a bit drab.

Leaving the Crooked River I heard a southbound finishing a meet at Oakbrook.  Doing the math I figured I had enough time to return to Madras, fuel, and head for South Jct.   My estimates were correct and as I arrived at South Jct. the southbound H-PASBAR was finishing a Dixon meet.  That gave me 30 minutes to scope out the area for my photo.  Man was I surprised to see the second unit in the consist!  The UP 2002 of all things on a BNSF manifest.

2002 at South Jct.

The southbound was headed for Round Butte for a meet with another northbound UP manifest (another M-RVPT).  Again doing the math I figured around a couple of hours for the northbound to arrive.  That allowed me time to enjoy dinner (yes, food at South Jct. is BYOB) and take a walk around the recreation area to scope out photo locations.  As it ended up the two spots I liked either required good light or for it to be dark enough to allow for about 20-30 second exposure.  With the streaming clouds and occasional showers it was clear that good light wasn’t going to happen so I hoped for a delay so it would be darker.  I got neither so my last photo of the day was a compromise based on the conditions.

After dark at South Jct.

That does it for my Trunk adventures for now.  I do have to say I’m hooked on this unique operation so I expect to be back again.

After a refreshing spring break trip to the beach, its back to railfanning for me.  On Saturday I made another one day trip to the Oregon Trunk to become more familiar with the South Jct. to Redmond segment.  I’ll post on that later this week.  Sunday I set out with the goal of capturing a few images of the Vancouver rail construction projects.  Yep, that’s right, projects.

Right after the first of the year the West Vancouver Freight Access project phase I kicked off.  Aaron and I learned that this first phase will construct a spur off the Fallbridge sub near Eighth St. to serve Albina fuel and the LaFarge cement plant south of the depot.  The second phase will extend the spur west into the port with the goal of all movements to and from the east using this track instead of the hill and grain lead they use now.  The primary goal of the project is to speed up entry and exit into the port which is now slowed by the fact trains have to cross the Seattle sub at Vancouver center. 

West Side Frieght Access Construction

This should be a very interesting project due to watch as there will eventually be a shoo fly built while the trestle near 6th St. is replaced and the fact the first nearly 1000′ of the spur will be on an elevated right of way built on a pre-manufactured concrete wall system. 

The second project is the construction of a storage track or third main track between the north end of the B Yard and 39th St.  In February a switch and some porta potties showed up which is a sure sign that work was about to begin.  In mid-March, during a one day long main 1 window, the switch was installed just north of the Fruit Valley Rd. overpass.  In the last week a minor amount of sub grade work was done just south of the switch.  Other than that progress has been slow. 

A northbound grain train passes the location of the new storage track

Track to nowhere

As has been mentioned on various forums the approach signals for Vancouver Center and Vancouver Jct. North were replaced with a dwarf signal.  I’m sure that is temporary until the new signals are installed at the Fruit Valley crossing location.  When the opportunity presents itself I grab a shot of the stubby little thing.  This storage track is actually part of the Vancouver Rail Project which involves the overpass at 39th St.  

These projects should make the next 3 years fairly interesting around here!

In many regards the 1960s were different than today but unfortunately in some regards they were not.   Despite how much people think highly of the current era or romanticize about history people make mistakes in judgement today just like in the past. 

Take this photograph of a grade crossing accident in Toppenish, WA taken sometime before 1963.  While the true story of this incident is not easily found, it appears from the photo someone did not heed the clearly marked crossing and ended up with their automobile draped across the bulldog nose of a Northern Pacific F unit (NP 5407A if you are keeping score). 

What distracted this driver?  Probably the same sorts of things that would distract a driver today…the radio (hey, maybe Kennedy was on the radio?), traffic, food, a passenger, or maybe they were just in a hurry.  Most likely, just like today, it was not a situation where getting to the other side of the tracks was something that couldn’t wait a few minutes.

We have learned a lot since this photograph was taken.   We have come to know that the refined oils and fuels we use to keep our cars moving are hazardous to the environment and treat spills with the utmost care (23-19!, 23-19! for Monsters Inc. fans).  So today it is highly unlikely to find someone simply hosing the spilled lube oil, anti-freeze, and fuel from the pavement!  We also understand more about the factors that cause pedestrians and drivers to not recognize a train is approaching and through improved technology, improved visibility at the crossing, and improved visibility of the approaching train we’ve made crossings safer.  On top of that railroads and local agencies have made a tremendous effort to close as many crossings as they can even though the alternative is expensive.

We haven’t learned a lot since this photograph was taken.  Not all drivers have gotten the basic message and unfortunately as long as grade crossings exists the basic fact is these accidents still occur  So Look and Listen and lead your friends and family to do the same!

As I’ve mentioned before I really like Lightroom.  As a software package it provides most of what I need to organize and edit my photos.   For those things that LR wasn’t designed to do naively Adobe provided a method for developers to construct their own export plug-ins to fill in the gaps.  LR was also constructed so develop module edits can be saved as a preset and web and slideshow outputs can be customized using templates.  I believe this flexibility will be one of the key factors to LR’s long term success (and potentially some smart developers )

I’ve started using a couple of presets and plug-ins that I’ve found useful.  With presets the field is long and wide since they are easily created out of Lightroom (click the + next to presets and choose the develop options to save) and quite a few photographers have published their presets on their websites.  Do a Google search on ‘Lightroom Presets’ and you’ll see what I mean.  Just because the field is so large doesn’t diminish the fact that this is fabulous ability it just shows that photographers want to share their skills.

Plug-ins and templates are a bit more challenging because they require external development work and testing so the field is a bit more limited.  Despite this barrier the two plug-ins I use most LR/Mogrify (export tools) and LR/Enfuse (HDR) are quite powerful and really add a lot to the basic export features of LR.   Web and slideshow templates are an area I haven’t delved into too much yet though I’m carefully watching some very intriguing web gallery and slideshow tools.  I’m hoping to take advantage of these for my gallery sometime in the future.

This photograph of a northbound BNSF Manifest at Steilacoom was made with LR/Enfuse.  The first photo was edited to maximize the exposure on the mid and foreground.  The second photo was edited to maximize the expose on the sky and background.  LR/Enfuse then combined the two to increase the dynamic range of the image to provide a better appearance in the highlight areas which weren’t the main focus of the original exposure.

Railroading isn’t the easiest job.  You have to interact with large, heavy equipment and you must be mentally alert at all times.  Despite these obstacles a dedicated group of railroaders works everyday to execute their job safely.  Sunday provided several opportunities for me to capture these folks carrying out their duties.

All Lined Back South End of the NP Pass

Two Cars Herder

Roger, All Clear On Bags

I just thought I’d say hello…graphically…

The nice thing about the section of the Trunk between Dike and Nena is the access.  You can easily pick up a train south of Dike and then give chase south towards Maupin.  Train speeds vary from 25-35 mph and with all the bends in the river the road often takes a shorter route.  In that stretch there is 17 miles of gravel road that is in generally good shape plus another 10 miles that is paved.  I did that with the UP 5423 south which I caught at Sinamox, the bridges and Sherar, and finally at a river access near Maupin.  The road south of Maupin is not in very good shape and 15 to 20 mph is about the max so chasing is out of the question.  The UP 5423 ran away from me on that stretch though I nearly caught when it went into a 10 mph restriction north of Nena.  With good planning though you can get a shot north of Maupin and then muddle along the road south and get one more.

The Deschutes is a popular fishing river.  Since it was a beautiful day there were several fisherman and a couple of drift boaters on the river.  I’m sure most of the time the fisherman don’t pay any attention to the trains but this one actually gave it a glance.

The Z-BRLC crosses the White River north of Maupin.  This spot is in good light all day from sun up to sun set.

Clear block!  BNSF 4171 North illuminates the rock wall at MP 45.1.

Wow, so far, in two days, I’ve seen 3 Acelas, 8 New Jersey Transit LRTs, 6 Air Trains, 13 New Jersey Commuter Trains, 6 PATH Trains, 4 Metro Subway Trains, and 4 Regional Amtrak Trains.  All that and only 2 Freight trains!

Yes, you might have guessed I’m over here in the North East Corridor riding around aimlessly.  I’ve also remembered, unlike the last several trips, to actually bring the camera!  So far I have a few pictures that have come out fairly decent.  So below you’ll find those, until again, happy train hunting.

Oh yeah, and if anybody thought that trains ran on time over here, they don’t.  Almost every train I’ve been on has been 5-15 minutes late.  Not bad by the standards of the rest of the country, but by no means upholding the mythic timeliness that I’ve heard of.

With UP’s Cascade line shut down due to the massive slide at Frazier I took an opportunity to head over to the Oregon Trunk to photograph some of the regular and detour trains.  Other than a couple of random photos at Moody and a 4449 excursion to Bend I’ve never spent much time exploring the details of the “Trunk”.  Since driving between various points can be time and gas consuming I chose to concentrate Saturday’s exploration to the segment between Dike and Nena (approximately).  This section has a public road all along it and is pretty ‘easy’ to photograph since everything is right out in the open. 

For the day I saw 7 trains!  Here’s the breakdown…

North:
2 UP
1 BNSF

South:
2 UP
2 BNSF

Over the next week or so I’ll post some of the photos as I have time to post process them.  For now here’s a couple that really reflect on the area.

Just after sunrise in the canyon, UP’s Z-LCBR winds its way north at the confluence of the White River and the Deschutes.
Mt. Hood looms above.

The Oregon Trunk between OT Jct. and Gateway traverses canyons formed by the Deschutes, Trout Creek, and Mud Springs Creek.  These rivers have cut their way though the rock giving the railroad a pre-made path from the Columbia to Central Oregon.  UP’s Q-PWRV takes advantage of this as it winds along the Deschutes 3 miles north of Sherar.

Lately my photographic interests have often led me away from the rails, but they’re always nearby and a part of my life. Last weekend I participated in a photowalk around Portland led by photographer Thomas Hawk. As we neared the end of our walk we happened to be on the Broadway Bridge as a set of light power came south out of Albina. I shot it moving along the bank of the Willamette River:

Once crossing a river was daunting.  Today rivers don’t stand in the way of the fast trains of Amtrak Cascades.

 Cascades train 501

Comfortable travel