Archive for November, 2007

I haven’t posted any good railroad links around here lately, but I definitely want to share one with you.  I recently discovered FL9, a blog and photo site from Texas which features some great photos along with good writing.  Check it out!

Well, it was finally time. In the middle of downtown San Francisco I decided Joleen and I were going to get our Digital SLR Finally. Already we’ve blazed through about 600 pictures figuring out various things about the camera. San Francisco being an awesome place to do just that.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be pulling some of our “ok” newbie pictures out of the lot and posting them online. Of course at this stage of learning about the camera I like about everything that comes out of the thing. I also will definitely have some street running light rail shots of the MUNI LRVs coming up. Unfortunately I haven’t shot much heavy rail yet, lacking the opportunity.

Within the first day of shooting I already have had warnings and interrogations about what I’m taking pictures of. America’s paranoia is definitely two things; lame and absurd. My friend Mike and I had a conversation with a member of San Francisco’s SWAT Team that patrols the corridors of the BART System. Mainly after being reprimanded for taking a picture or three of the platform. Maybe I’ll post those just to be hard headed.

Anyway, beyond the interesting experiences, fun learning lessons, and the rip roaring fun of San Francisco I must finish this entry for now and am looking forward to many great pictures and future postings of said pictures in this space!

So cheers, I’m stoked to finally have joined the Digital SLR crowd!

Many new digital photographers ask the question “Should I use my camera’s RAW output or .jpg?”. As we move further into the digital era this question gets asked less and less, but there are still those that ask. For those that ask me, I always recommend RAW. Why? It provides complete information from the capture which image processing software can use to finish an image.

Do you still need some evidence? If so jump over to Luminous Landscape and take a look at the tutorial Michael Reichmann posted on the topic. The difference between the two is pretty significant.

“Cap’n we’ve got a railfan dead ahead and he’s shoot’n at us!”

There’s three strong clues in the photo as to if I would actually get run over or not. Can you find them?

Railfan Ahead!

For Railroads Illustrated’s Day In North America I chose to railfan UP’s Brooklyn Sub. I’m reasonably familiar with the line north of Albany but I’d never spent any time between Albany and Eugene so part of my adventure was to learn the area. Wouldn’t you know it the day was wet and rainy, but what the heck it was October in the Northwest so out came the engineered plastic camera shields (I believe mine are Safeway brand…as in I’ll take plastic). The rain did let up a bit so I could get some photos without being soaked.

After a full day of shooting I had some night photos in mind and Salem was the perfect spot for them. Standing on the platform I was serenaded by the usual railfan radio enhanced by the live band across the street at The Ram. Ahh, Saturday night in a college town!

On October 20, 2007 Salem’s beautiful brick depot observes the passage of yet another freight as UP’s Q-PDWC rolls past at track speed.

Salem Nights

It seems on Veteran’s Day that it’s almost a bit cliche to post a picture of a relatively clean UP Building America unit with the flag, but we should pause and realize that as much as we may love a railroad, our country’s veterans have performed far more important tasks.  Take a moment to honor them on Veteran’s Day.

I shot this photo a couple weekends ago between Vader and Winlock along the Seattle Sub. This is one of the freshly-repaired Talgo trainsets in service on the Amtrak Cascades.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Perhaps the mismatched paint scheme?  With Amtrak’s region-specific paint scheme on the Cascades, they simply don’t have enough correctly-painted locomotives to cover all of the trains.  And when one (or more) is out of service for maintenance, the situation gets worse.

But who am I kidding… as a railfan I’d be out shooting it even with some grungy gray freight locomotive…

If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing Dogcaught on the new server. There’s a few outstanding issues, including getting the sidebar gallery thumbnails to properly display the photos as well as a couple other things, but for the most part the site is up and running.

If you find any problems, please leave a comment on this post.

Some software upgrades this evening took a bit longer than anticipated, so the server move is being postponed until late tomorrow night. Expect periodic disruptions throughout the rest of the weekend.

There will be some site downtime this weekend.   I will be moving Dogcaught.com to a new server beginning at 19:00 on Friday evening.  Once I begin the move, you may see error messages on the site or find it inaccessible until it comes up on the new server.  I figure the actual site move shouldn’t take longer than an hour, but updating the nameservers (so that when you type dogcaught.com in your browser it ends up at the right server) can take 24-48 hours to propagate throughout the internet.

In short, this would be a great weekend to get out and railfan instead of sitting at your computer and reading this site

I will make a post once things are up on the new server.

Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom has been on sale for 9 months now and with the release of version 1.2 more folks are starting to ask about it and if it is the right tool. I’ve known for a while why Adobe Photoshop Lightroom works for me, but I haven’t taken the time to put my thoughts to words. My motivation for this post comes from a blog post by another photographer that I think does a good job of clarifying the purposes of CS and Lightroom.

George Barr is a fine art photographer and user of Photoshop (presumably a CS version). In a recent blog post George helped me with placing Lightroom into the spectrum of photo editing tools. George says:

When I went to inkjet printing of my black and white images, it seemed perfectly natural to take advantage of the powerful editing tools available via computer, in my case with Photoshop. I could now manipulate both further and more accurately and in smaller areas and more areas than ever before.

It was a natural extension to continue these techniques when I started working in colour and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have any loyalty to the original colour as recorded.

Gasp! No loyalty to the original color? For a railfan photographer that (for the most part) is a no no. He continues…

This is radically different from colour slide photographers (whatever the format) who have very strong ideas of maintaining colour fidelity and go to great lengths to do so. When these people switch to the digital darkroom, they tend to make global changes (as if they were filtering in the camera) and that’s about all. For people like this applications like Lightroom are all they need…

Those of us who have no loyalty to the original scene, thinking of it only in terms of fodder for our art work tend to prefer to use Photoshop and it’s powerful ways of manipulating an image.

Now we’re talking! Most railfans have a strong loyalty to the original color of the image and to the original scene, especially when their favorite paint scheme or location is depicted. Based on that thought the reality is we don’t all need Photoshop CS^* for what we do, we need something that can globally edit the image to get the look just right quickly…and that Lightroom does well and that’s why I use it.

^*While CS may not be required, Lightroom does not have output sharpening, so another tool is required to perform that work.

The last installment about my 7 day railfan adventure around the desert…

Day 6 - After a lengthy but beautiful drive from Tucson north to Kingman we headed out for the western Seligman and Needles subs. Ok, you’ll have to sit down for this one, but we were semi-skunked at Kingman around sunrise. Yes, that’s right, the transcon failed to produce a train at the exactly the right time. It was Monday, so I guess we get what we get. So much for the beautiful sunrise shot at Kingman.

We spent most of the mid day hours at Klinefelter enjoying the various curves and rock cuts. We headed west following the H-KCKBAR9 which turned out to be quite the joyful encounter! After photographing it we landed at Ludlow for some of the last light of the day where I captured the Z-WSPNBY8 ripping around the curve in the setting sun.

Desert Sunset

Day 7 - We spent the night in Barstow and headed out in the morning for a West Daggett sunrise. Just like always this spot never fails for a fabulously orange desert sunrise. This time the V-SBDMGO3 provided the subject.

Desert Sunrise

Next we headed for Basin at the east end of Afton canyon. This place is raw and at spots the railroad appears to live on a limited lease. It seems like a torrent of water could wash down this canyon and wipe out 100 years of railroading history in a few moments. Fortunately it was far too hot and dry for that on our visit so we just enjoyed a day of normal operations on the Cima Sub.

K-Line Exits Afton

After a few trains at Basin the Cima sub cooled off. We started making our way to Las Vegas for the rendezvous with our flight home. We took the ‘long way’ following the railroad over the summit hoping to catch something. Along the way we made a stop at the fantastic Kelso, CA depot to wrap up our adventure.

Kelso

So ends my trip of good light…may there be good light in your future!