photography

Image Organization

by Steve Eshom on February 8, 2012

The Portland section of Amtrak’s Empire Builder goes by the slang term “Baby Builder”  This refers to the fact it is only 4 cars compared with 7+ for the the Seattle section.

I have a couple of items I’ve been wanting to cover when it comes to railfan image organization.  The first one is from something I’ve heard too many of my railfan friends say.  They say that they have so many images they can’t find them.  That bothers me.  If you have excellent work hiding on your hard drive or in (gasp!) slides, and you don’t know it, you and the rest of us in the railfan community are missing out.

With today’s technology there are plenty of tools available to catalog images.  In my mind any tool worth anything to the railfan photographer has to provide access to the camera metadata (if digital, if not has to allow entry of key metadata), has to allow for custom tags to be associated to an image, and has to allow for searches using combinations of those elements.  For us railfans tags like engine numbers, railroad names, locations, and subdivisions are common items we like to tack on besides the date and time.  From my observations we are quite a passionate group about knowing all of those particular details.  Basically what I’m saying here is any solution should have the ability to capture the specific data items which are unique to the photographer’s subject and data needs.

Most catalogs today will let you tag what ever data you want to.  I personally tag all of my railroad related images with 3 particular items.

  1. An event.  This is basically the reason I’m out shoot.  It can range from “2011 Tracks In The Snow” or “2005 Western Star Excursion” to my catch all for my catch all “Vancouver Railfanning”
  2. Engine number(s). Any engine I can get the number off of in the image I include.  ”BNSF 1099″, “UP 3985″, “NIWX 2891″.
  3. Location.  This is the geographic or even common location name for a place.  ”Sullivan’s Curve”, “Stein’s Hill”, “West Wishram”, “East Berne”
I’ve started tagging railroad related images with general tags too.  For example the image in this post is tagged with 2012 01/16 Gorge, AMTK 191, Mountain, North Bonnevile, Snow.
Any cataloging solution should not care where or how you store your images.  It seems that for every individual out there there is a different way to store images on disk and so the catalog shouldn’t care that you have files in folders on 8 different external drives wired in through 3 different interfaces.  Like wise it shouldn’t care what the file names are.  If at one point all of the information about the image was in the file name, it shouldn’t care about files named sp4449bingensteamspecialwithamtk161andotherimportantandmostlyrelevantinformation.jpg.  I know that for each camera brand I’ve owned over the years the naming conventions are slightly different so I have file names all over the map.   By the way keeping pertinent information about the photo in the file name is not the way to go.  Technology is too good to limit yourself to what you can put in 256 characters.
I realize cataloging isn’t something you just do one day and be done with it.  If you have 10s of thousands of photos it will take some time.  In fact it may take years if there is no starting point.  I know when I had to catalog my scanned images I had to sit down and review them one by one and enter the data.  The effort took time.   Cataloging may also cost money.  I’m aware railfans are a cheap bunch but honestly good software will save you time and make your job easier.  $299 may seem steep but if spending that money means the difference of months off of your cataloging effort it is a drop in the bucket.
At the beginning of this post I alluded to a second issue.  The second item is related to the first.  It has to do with the general feeling there is no cataloging solution for me so I have to build it myself.   Home grown solutions work and I will support anyone who takes the step to catalog even if it is a non-transferable one-off solution.  At least there is a catalog and the images can be found!

I don’t like custom solutions though because generally the images and the data are not necessarily together in one tidy place.   A spreadsheet for example is the most common alternate method I’ve seen.  The issue I have with that is the images are no where to be found in the spreadsheet.  Once you’ve filtered the spreadsheet for all images shot in Cruzatte, OR you can’t see them.  You likely know the file names but you still have to go find them.  This disconnected situation is only going to cause more trouble so I can’t recommend it as a best practice.   Software like Lightroom or Aperture is very flexible to your needs as a cataloger so please don’t believe it won’t work for you…it will!

I guess this is my call to action for my railfan friends who aren’t cataloging.  Get going on an image catalog!  Buy Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements, or any stand alone catalog system (these all have free trials to allow you to experiment).  Start cataloging the new photos you take first then work your way into the archives and catalog the older images.   I think you’ll feel good about it.   You’ll know images you have and you’ll have the ability to find them which should give you peace of mind about your collection.  Additionally you’ll have a curated collection which will be consumable by you in your lifetime and will be available to others once you are no longer able to manage it yourself.

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Rainy Night in Portland

by Steve Eshom on February 1, 2012

Sunday evening a Google+ photo walk, organized by three local photographers, was held in Portland.   Aaron and I joined in the festivities though railroad photographs were not the primary focus of this walk.  The walkers were made up of a variety of photographers from around the area including some from north of Everett.   The walk started at Union Station and proceeded towards the river, the Eastbank Esplanade, and eventually the Hair of the Dog Brewery on the east side.  Hey, photographers of all sorts love beer, not just railfans!

Sunday the weather grew increasingly wetter and by the time the walk started around 4:30pm the rain was steady.  Despite the dampness quite a crowd showed up and impressed the organizers who thought many would not attended.  I had a couple of rail related images I wanted to capture and right out of the gate I set up for a couple of them.  As we moved along it grew dark and the wet streets started to reflect light from various street lights, headlights, signs, and buildings.  There was a lot of shiny goodness going on!

When I arrived at the Skidmore Fountain MAX stop I saw a wonderful photo brewing.  Street lights lit the area brightly and the reflections from the cobblestone textured streets were spectacular.  I set up my tripod and waited for a MAX train to arrive.  The result?  This colorful image of a westbound blue line train departing Skidmore Fountain.  As we walked we talked about how if any of us got 1 or 2 really good shots from the walk, we’d be happy.  After I saw this shot on the computer, I was happy.

If you are interested in other’s results from the walk you can view everyone’s contributed  images from the photowalk, including mine and Aaron’s here.

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In The Cascades

by Steve Eshom on January 28, 2012

When you drive up the Columbia River Gorge on the highway it is really tough to tell sometimes that you are passing through a pretty major mountain range.  The mountains are certainly there but they tower above so high that it isn’t really obvious what is going on.  If you drive I-84 and look across at Washington the mountains are not as abrupt or as steep as on the Oregon side so you have the illusion that you are passing through a gentle valley.   That’s far from the truth.

I love to find places where the river is fairly narrow and you can easily photograph across it.  Moffett Creek below Bonneville dam is one of the places where that is possible.  With fresh snow on the mountains and the rocky terrain I knew I wanted to visit here and capture a Union Pacific train crossing the bridge.   UP set me up with two trains for this so I took advantage.

What is hard to see in this image is how tall the mountain in the background really is.  The river is around 40′ above sea level and Wauneka Point tops out at over 2800′ (according to mytopo.com)!   This image is actually a panorama shot vertically at 51mm and from what I can tell I’m only showing about 1/3 of the mountain.  Impressive to be in the Cascades.

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More Snow in The Gorge

by Steve Eshom on January 25, 2012

Most of the snow from the January 15th snow storm fell west of Bingen.  The result was I spent the day west of Bingen too!  Snow in the gorge has been pretty sparse lately so I wanted to take advantage.  Most of the morning I hung out around North Bonneville photographing Amtrak, several BNSF westbounds, and two eastbound UP trains.  The gorge is pretty narrow and cluttered with trees around North Bonneville.  I knew I wanted a wider view to demonstrate what the snow looked like so after lunch I drove to Dog Mountain to wait for an eastbound.

Since it was Monday maintenance was out in full force so I took a quick trip to Underwood during a lull to see what the White Salmon River looks like after the Condit Dam breach.   I’ve read many people’s complaints about how the breach has ruined one of the best salmon fishing locations in the Gorge.  I will agree that the river is choked with muck but since the October 26, 2010 breach we really haven’t had any high water.  Once we have a few heavy rains it appears a river channel will reappear there.  Now, what will happen with the back water areas?  Good question.  I’m sure mother nature will show us.

I arrived back a Dog Mountain about the same time and eastbound stack train was going through Stevenson.  Perfect.  I climbed the hill and gathered in the photo I was looking for.

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Dogcaught Upgrades

by Steve Eshom on January 18, 2012

Aaron and I will be making some behind the scenes changes to dogcaught.com over the next week.  The result is you may experience some outages or unusual responses.  Don’t worry everything will be as it was and we’ll get back to our normal content.

As a teaser here’s a photo I took on Monday while I visited the Columbia River Gorge.  We received a bit of snow down to the river level on Sunday so I ran out Monday to take advantage.  This image is the DPU of a west bound grain train crossing Cascade Dr. in North Bonneville, Wa.

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