Archive for February, 2006

• Train photographs by Gerald Brimacombe
  (tags: photographers railroad photos)

Consider it a teaser of my show I’m preparing for the Friday before Winterail…

For those of you using RSS to keep up with Dogcaught, I’ve added an RSS feed for my photography gallery. Here’s the RSS Feed Link

Today the fog hadn’t yet burned off down by the river during my lunch break, so I had to see what I could find to shoot since there wasn’t too much moving.

First, a detail shot of the back of the cab on an SW1200:

I drove down and parked near the north end of the Columbia River Drawbridge, and decided to see what I could do with the bridge in the fog. While I was under the end of the bridge, shooting, a cop drove by, pulled a U turn, came back and asked me to chat with her a bit. She was curious what I was up to, was totally professional, wanted to make sure I wasn’t some terrorist with warrants, and the whole thing was really a nonevent. I was curious what responses my teaser earlier would bring

Anyway, the bridge photos:

You can say what you want, but I’ll have to point out to Jennifer that I’m not yet to this state…

Checked out by the Vancouver Police, that is.

Stay tuned later tonight for the photos I was taking at the time…

• energyface » tutorial - how to clone people
  A tutorial on how to clone people in a picture using Photoshop
  (tags: photoshop tutorials)

The weather has been pretty much gray and gloomy the last few days, so I haven’t bothered to go out and take a bunch of photos which will likely turn out rather unimpressive. Today I took a few shots, none of which will win any awards, but there’s something you don’t see everyday.

First, the OVWWO pulls out of the old NP yard onto Main 1 at the center:

Then a couple shots of the Port of Vancouver’s switcher dropping some grain cars into the yard.

• USA Rail on Google Maps and Google Earth
  A mashup of Amtrak stations and Google Maps
  (tags: googlemaps google amtrak maps)

Just a random note to other bloggers: Don’t make me register to leave you a comment. Because I won’t.

I’m sure a bunch of my readers here simply browse to this webpage and read. That works just fine. However if you have several blog-style sites or discussion forums you visit, you can use a technology called RSS to gather all that information into one place for browsing.

At first I thought the “23 Easy Steps” thing was a joke, but it’s fairly accurate and not that difficult.

Read about RSS in 23 Easy Steps from the Chicago Tribune

As expected, Canon has announced the 30D and some new lenses.

Under the things-I-want department:
Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF-S 17 - 55 mm F2.8 IS lens
Canon EF 85 mm F1.2 L II lens

Back in the reality department, I might eventually own a 30D, but my next lens purchase is still going to be the EOS 135mm f/2.0L

One of the imgSeek developers saw my earlier rant about how their implementation was sucking my bandwidth. They’ve now changed so that they’re caching the thumbnails on their server.

Further thoughts on imgSeek:

• Let me choose which image(s) to bookmark. The current bookmarklet sends all of the images on a page to their server. The result is that header images and other such junk ends up in the database. On this site, it takes my headshot from the sidebar when that surely isn’t what I wanted to bookmark.
• Give the images some context. Linking directly to a raw image file on a server doesn’t provide much information. Instead, do like the search engines’ image searches, and link to the page that has the bookmarked image so that the user can see the context.

I’ll be honest, I don’t foresee myself using this site, since I really don’t go searching out images such as this… I use google image search probably twice a year, and it’s when I know how to describe what I’m looking for.

I have created an online gallery of some of my best photos (railroad and otherwise). Check out the Aaron Hockley photo gallery. If you have comments about a specific image you can leave them with that image in the gallery by using the small “note” icon under each image.

• John’s Alaska Railroad Page
  The most comprehensive Alaska railroad fan page on the internet
  (tags: alaska+railroad alaska railroad travel)

This morning I read about another new social bookmarking site in town, and this one has a twist, it’s for photos. our.imgSeek.net seeks to combine the likes of flickr and del.icio.us by letting users “tag” images they find on the web. Based on the user’s tagging of images, the site then makes recommendations about other images the user might like.

I’ve got one huge beef with this: the way the site is implemented, it steals my bandwidth. I signed up for an account, and for kicks decided I’d go tag one of my images. I chose my photoshopped down-on shot of the CN 5714 I posted last week. Once I tagged the image, I went to the site and looked at the photo. A “view source” revealed that they’re embedding the photo directly off my domain using an IMG tag. Every time someone looks at the photo on their site, it sucks my bandwidth.

Come on guys… this isn’t going to fly. Update your code. Create your small little 90 pixel wide cache image on your site, then if a user wants to see the whole image, let them click through to my site and see the image in its original context. It’s a brand new app with almost zero impact (only 39 users as of this posting) but if it catches on, I’ll block the domain if they don’t shape up. Deep-linking embedded images (especially large ones) has always been a no-no, and our.imgSeek.net needs to use some internet etiquette.

I’m compiling what I consider my best and most interesting photos.

The most interesting and unique images aren’t those out on the mainlines of today’s Class 1 railroads. The most interesting ones are shortlines, people, lines, patterns, and other such un-typical-foamer things.

So why is it that I spend so much time trying to shoot mainline Class 1s?

Update: Steve Boyko is right: it’s because I’m an impatient sucker and can find more trains when I shoot a Class 1.

Today there was some griding action around 8th street on the Fallbridge sub. Nothing here is going to win any photographic art awards, but here’s some grinder photos for the foamer in y’all:

As a relatively new (and happy) iMatch user, I was excited yesterday to recieve e-mail about the release of iMatch 3.5 which is a long-awaited upgrade featuring many new features (and some bug fixes).

Take a look at the Photools homepage or go straight to the iMatch 3.5 Release Notes.

Don’t get complacent and think “That’s a boring photo I can take any day, so I won’t bother”. Things change.

For a concrete example, as long as I’ve railfanned Vancouver the transfer would always have a couple of geeps. Sure, I took lots of pictures of it. But there were plenty of days when I said “why bother”… and it appears that era is now through.

This week I’ve seen the transfer on three days… each day with a widecab GE… C44-9W units on two days, and a B40-8W today.

For nostalgia’s sake here’s a shot of a geep-led transfer.