Foamers vs. Photographers

by Aaron Hockley on October 15, 2006

I think the difference between a foamer, FRN, etc and a photographer can be summed up in this RailroadForums thread.

Only a foamer could say that’s a good looking consist. A photographer looks at that mis-matched bunch of crud with no consistent lines and wonders whether or not to even press the shutter button…

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  • http://www.theboykos.com/nbrr/blog Steve Boyko

    It’s an ugly consist no mother would love, sure. But I would definitely be shooting it. I guess it comes down to what you want to do as a photographer.

  • Steve Eshom

    It certainly is an interesting consist and I personally wouldn’t mind seeing a pair of the repainted P32′s back to back. As for the photo, I’m happy someone captured 507′s first trip north.

  • http://weblog.pell.portland.or.us/~orc David Parsons

    I suspect a professional photographer would take pictures of a bizarre consist like that without even blinking., because (a) you don’t see a consist like that every day and you might be able to get an interesting view, and (b) you might be able to sell it to one of the railfan magazines.

    And if you’ve got a digital camera, there’s really no downside to taking pictures even if they’re nothing but practice for getting good fast shots. If you take 20 or so pictures, it’s 1/100000th of the life of the photo sensor in the camera?

    A raggedy consist like that, framed against some appropriately raggedy city scene? I’d think that would be photographic gold. If you could park yourself on 7th street in Portland and get a 90° picture as the train crossed in front of the dairy, how could it not turn out to be a good picture? If it was sunny enough (and late enough), you’d get a lovely silhouette of the industrial buildings between the ex-SP mainline and Powell, and you’d get a silhouette of the Eng!’s that roughly follows the line of the buildings.

    (Me? I’d end up getting an indifferent picture as the train crossed Powell, because there’d be the usual traffic jam on the Ross Island bridge and it would drop me off at Milwaukie just as the train blew across 12th Ave. Not that this has ever happened to me before, of course.)

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