It's oooh sooo quiiiet.....howabout some pictures?

[Harlock]

At long last! As the snow melts away and spring turns into summer, here are my images from this February.

For your prototype referencing goodness...

You can find the full set of 146 photos in the first two galleries at www.pro-photography.net/gallery/ and I've included some highlights below.

Enjoy!

--Mike

[siggy]

Mike - your photography is simply stunning! Thanks for sharing it with us.

I know this isn't a photography group but I know for a fact that there are several photography hobbyists on this list. Maybe you could post some info on what you're shooting with, what kinds of post-processing you do, tips, tricks, or whatever to help us photo challenged individuals with desire improve our skills.

As you may guess based on this post I have a love-hate relationship with photography. I love taking pictures and dinking around in Photoshop but I've never had much luck getting quality results - mainly because I don't really know what I'm doing. Feel free to reply off list if you feel it appropriate to do so but I suspect many in the group would appreciate the tips so we can all post better photos. Thanks.

Robert

[Harlock]

All those pictures above are shot with a Canon 20D, using 17-35mm for the really wide shots, 24-105 and 100-400 telephoto lenses. All are canon's 'L' series.

Circular polarizers and sometimes gradient filters are a must. When shooting trains, you always have to keep the shutter speed very high when they are moving. 400 FPS or higher. To do this you need to balance ISO settings and apeature to also get a decent depth of field when shooting those big landscapes. I approach railroad photography from a travel/landscape perspective and try to compose the train as just another element in a larger scene.

I've found that Locomotives generally fool the in-camera meter into overexposing, so if I'm setting up an iconic shot like the ones above, I'll manually meter for a correct exposure on the landscape, and then when the locomotive runs through the frame the black paint won't fool it into overexposing. When I'm doing quick handheld shots, I'll set apeature preferred mode and set the exposure compensation to -1 stop if there's a lot of black paint in the frame. Manual exposure is doubly important for snow - set the snow in the 90% range and everything else will fall into place. Cameras will typically expose the snow to 80% gray if you let it do its own thing, making it look dirty and muddy.

Locomotives are very hard to photograph, I've found that they look best in snow, you get a lot of bounce light and diffuse reflection to fill in the black. The best time to photograph is at sunrise, when there is a lot of condensed steam and the light is horizontal. Sunset is OK but not as much steam. We spent a lot of freezing mornings out there getting those shots.

My best advice is practice, practice practice. I started 10 years ago. In the last 4 years I've done a lot of published commercial photography. Anyone can learn if they take the time to photograph a lot and critique their photos, comparing them to other images. Nowadays the learning curve is a lot faster with instant digital playback, I had to learn on film. Every bad frame cost money.

Go out and learn landscapes first, and then add locomotives to that. If you take the time to understand how the camera works and why the settings are the way they are, you'll have many more hits, and not just luck. You might look into some of Galen Rowell's materials. He was very egalatarian about passing on his knowledge. Sadly he died in a plane crash a few years ago. All of his experience is with film, but everything translates to digital.

As far as post processing, always shoot in RAW mode, and you can adjust the exposure and color balance after you shoot, as well as eliminating noise from high ISO settings.

Photoshop is king and I use it for everything that I can't adjust in RAW mode, but if you can't afford the $600 you can try Gimp, which is a free open source alternative. I haven't used it lately but apparently it's pretty complete at this point.

Adjusting the color balance and the levels so that the image is optimized is the key to getting prints that pop. Lots of stuff can look good on a monitor and look muddy on a print, it's the color slide effect. Transmissive mediums (monitors, slide projectors) make everything bright and beautiful while reflective mediums like photo prints or inkjet prints need every ounce of bright to eek out a vibrant image. This is critical with black locomotives, you need to boost the blacks just enough to get the detail out without looking unrealistic. The shadow/highlight feature in Photoshop is a good tool for that.

Well, that's just enough to get into trouble.

Cheers,

--Mike