Archive for November, 2008

On my way to the Vancouver depot yesterday to meet up with Aaron and Robert I grabbed a photo of the Empire Builder Portland section crossing the Columbia River Draw.  With the nice weather we’ve had over the past few days the cloudless nights have allowed the temperature to drop giving us some nice fog around sunrise.  I’m sure those using the Columbia River for transporation don’t appreciate it, but I do as it adds a bit of mystery about what lies out of sight.

As can be the case on Sunday mornings in Vancouver train traffic was a bit slow so when an empty Rivergate grain train departed T6 the foamers converged.  The morning fog was mostly gone by this point offering some nice glint off the rails.

As Aaron and Robert headed out on the Wild Bush Chase I headed home to take care of some chores (yeah for leaves).

Got a bit of a surprise this morning while railfanning in Vancouver. Word came through the grapevine that UP 4141, the locomotive with the paint scheme for the George Bush Presidential Library, was on the QHKRV out of East Portland. A few minutes later we heard radio chatter indicating he was making a setout. Robert Scott and I decided to head south in hopes that it would be tied up in Brooklyn Yard for a bit. We found 4141 just north of Willsburg Junction, and after about an hour’s wait he finally finished his yard business and headed south. I was happy to capture a decently-lit shot of a rare unit.

Last month when a herd of railfans congregated in Centralia for a slideshow, I was in Los Angeles on a business trip. While there I got a chance to do a bit of railfanning for several hours with Jeff Bass

Our first stop was at Dolores Yard, where there just happened to be an open house / family day. We snapped a few photos including some of a couple of the UP Heritage Units on display. The lighting was only good for one of the units but since we don’t see theme often I figured I should capture them both.

Other photos to be posted in the coming days.

On my way home from Sunday railfanning at the depot I came across the South Lead switch engine at Rye Jct. making a set out for the PVJR.  Once they coupled into the two empties they decided to shove the loads and empties up the hill a couple of cars to clear the crossing.  Well, that’s easier said than done on the moderate grade heading up Burnt Bridge Creek.  After two tries and a couple of pounds of sand they finally got ‘er done.  It was a tough set out but the crew prevailed.

BNSF switcher and riding platform

Givin’ it all she’s got

I haven’t mentioned Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR) on Dogcaught for some time but since I get lots of questions about it I’m going to dedicate a post to it.  Much of my inspiration for this latest discussion is based on the questions I get about how LR is useful for railroad photography.  For this post I want to demonstrate how easily and effectively the features of the LR 2.1 develop module can can be quickly applied to a railroad photograph.

The Set Up

The week prior to the 6th Annual Autumn Leaf Slide Show I made a day trip on the Seattle Sub.  Thankfully it was nice sunny day and the fall colors were starting to look good.  Prior to my meeting with Robert I found myself south of Chehalis photographing the M EVEABN crawling up Napavine hill just after noon.  Here’s the straight out of the camera (SOOC) version and my focus of this example.

Edits

This image has a few issues the first of which is the fact it is slightly over exposed.   Since that is the most glaring (ha!) issue,  my first step on this image in LR is to bring down the exposure with the exposure slider.  I also didn’t care for the 8 X 12 dimension so I cropped down to 8 X 10. 

Ahh, now that’s much better.  Now the next issue is the unwanted reflection on the engineer’s window.  If any of you read Grumpy he has a special term for this which I’ll abstain from using here.  Let’s just say being glare bucked is pretty close to to what Grumpy calls it.

So what did I do to help this?  I turned to the best new feature in LR 2.x, the adjustment brush.  Using the adjustment brush I painted over the windshield and was then able to specifically control the several aspects of the selected area including the exposure, contrast, and saturation.  I ended up turning down the exposure by two more stops and decreasing the saturation to give the window a more black appearance to match the conductor’s window (the red highlight and pin are LR’s way of showing you what you’ve painted with the brush).

 

With the glaring issues addressed (dang, there I go again), I wanted to work on bringing out some of colors in the background and giving the photo a bit more contrast.  First I did a bit more highlight recovery (brings details out of highlights) by cranking it up to 22.  Next I applied clarity (local contrast enhancement) to give a bit more contrast to the details in the image (+27).  Lastly I punched up the colors a bit with Vibrance (+7).  

So the image is getting much closer now but the fall colors are lacking a bit of the glow they had visually.  This is where I turned to the tone curve.  On the tone curve I turned up the highlights to +77 and to bring out the glow on the leaves.  I also reduced the shadows to darken the less important parts of the image and add a touch more contrast.  You’ll now notice with the shadow areas darkened a bit the nose of the 4684 really stands out more prominently (this the one place you want a prominent nose :-)).

I think this image is starting to look pretty good.  I still saw some things I didn’t like around the glow on the nose so I reduced the luminance in both the reds and oranges to give the nose a bit more of a flat appearance.  The HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) controls really allow a lot of control over the colors in a photo.  I end up using them in just about every edit I do, especially those with a sky.

The last step is a bit of capture sharpening which will be applied to the full size image.  As I export the final image from LR I add in a low sharpen for the screen which is based off the capture sharpening with its masking, detail, radius, and amount  taken into consideration.  After around 5 minutes of editing I have the image on right below next to the SOOC version.

My Conclusions

When I’m asked if I think LR is better than Photoshop for developing an image I usually answer with “you can do everything in Photoshop that you can in Lightroom.  The advantage is Lightroom is designed for photographers while Photoshop is designed for everyone wishing to manipulate pixels.  This means the tools in LR are focused on the photographer’s efficiency.  Photoshop is extremely powerful but for many images, like this example, it has more capability than is needed.  This is where Lightroom’s quick, easy to use, and photographer focused development tools do the job much more efficiently.  For railfans, who are generally looking for a very natural and not over done image, the tools LR provides work very well.”   

I think the results from LR are fabulous.  As a result of the speed and ease of use I end up producing around 90% of all of my image output directly from LR making it my everyday photo tool. 

There’s much more to LR than Develop.  If you have more questions about LR, and how I use it for railroad photography feel free to drop me an email.

Despite the rain and wind over the past few days the fall colors are still holding up in places. Depending on the species and location some trees have most of their leaves while others (like the tree on the right in the attached image) have almost none. Early today the sun was out but that quickly changed to a heavy shower so my hopes of getting brilliant light on leaves faded. I instead concentrated on a scene that doesn’t require sun.

A loaded grain train dynamic brakes towards a stop at Eighth St. while passing over the mural bridge at the south edge of downtown Vancouver, WA.