(click any image for bigger and sharper)

We lived a mile from these tracks for about a year. Ben, who was only two when we moved away from there, first flexed his verbal muscles by declaring, “Wain!” every time he heard the locomotive’s horn Dopplering toward us.

Spectacular sunsets were the norm from our street. We lived in an area that was fairly flat, just north of the Ozark Mountains, between Joplin and Springfield, Missouri. Despite all the reports that colorful sunsets are a sign of the pollution in the air, capturing them on film has held a special place in my heart since my teen years.

Trains have fascinated me since my childhood, perhaps because I grew up in a town that featured neither trains nor tracks.

There we were, in a town that enjoyed all of the above in abundance, and I managed to combine them only once. The sunset above isn’t particularly impressive, but I liked the way the light shone on the tracks. Although the train itself was backlit pretty badly, I managed to eke out a little detail through the magic of combining two separate shots — one that preserved the colors in the sunset but left the train in Silhouette, and one that blew out the sky but let the train come through.

Here’s one that I’d always wanted to try. I set my aperture at f/22 to make everything sharp, and opened the shutter for about 1/2 second to blur the train’s movement. It was the last shot I took that day, and I got only this one exposure.

Sometimes I have a tendency to turn this into a photoblog. Photography is simply one of the many things I love, but it was the first hobby that pulled me completely into its clutches.

It hasn’t let go yet.

Have a great weekend, everybody.