Aug 31 2007
Train Your Eye on This (Pic of the Week)
(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.
If it’s what you enjoy, sharing it isn’t a bad thing Mark.
I like the pics…. the first one, had it been a bit lighter, might have even shown more colors.
I like what you did with the second one… very cool.
Have a great weekend bud!
We have tracks within a short walk of our house and frequently hear them rumbling along. Dex always stops, cocks his head, and lets us know when he can hear a train in the distance. Tavish, on the other hand, is petrified of them. Because there was this one time when we all went for a walk and ended up right beside the tracks as a train bore down on us. The combination of the vibrations, the ominous dopplering and then the piercing whistle JUST as it passed us scared the crap outta the poor kid. He’s a little better now. Still doesn’t like them though.
Your second shot there is pretty cool. I really like the look of motion amidst the rest of the static scenery.
Hi Mark,
Thanks in the first place for visiting my blog in return, to answer your question about my Dog’s name “Ios”, YES! thats indeed a Greek island AND YES, our dog is named after THAT greek island, because we love Greece so much…..
About your photo’s of today…
I think that the sunset - in combination with the darker sky and the train, is good ‘as it is’ , so I donot agree with the first ‘commenter Dave”, when you would make the photo lighter the intire athmosphere would ‘miss the point’ , in other words, : Its good as it is, even the sky is ( should be, and therefore stay that way) lightly red!
The second shot might be OK, but I don’t see ‘what it is’ , but trying out the ‘aperture and shutter’ hmmmm only when its making your shot better. But thats my opinion.
Visit my blog anytime you’re very wlecome,
today I capture the 5 pic’s in Black and white… I always have a subject because only the technic might not interest a big groop of blogreaders. ( I think)
Have a great weekend with your family , Bye JoAnn :)
I love that top photo. It’s really a great catch. The sunset, the tracks, the train barrelling down on the poor photographer. Awesome!
And I wouldn’t apologize for making this a photo blog. Your pictures are more interesting than most the stuff folks tend to share on their sites. I say keep up the cool sharing.
Love the photos and your thoughts too. Each enhances the other. I like the feeling of speed in the second shot and the sillohette effect in the first. Good stuff.
That top shot is AMAZING! I love it! NO apologies needed! :)
Dave and MG - Thanks, and I agree. At least I don’t plaster up every picture I shoot on a mobile phone camera (which I do not even have), each nearly imperceptibly different from the other.
Simon - I hope the little(r) man gets over the train thing. If not, then I guess he’ll never read many Agatha Christie novels.
But, I’m pretty sure you weren’t going to be shoving those his way, regardless.
JoAnn - Yeah, I liked it as-is, too. I admit, looking at it on the monitor here at Shannon’s uncle’s house, it looks much darker than it did on either of my monitors. Oh well, just goes to show you never know what the viewer will see.
Anna - Well, thank ye kindly.
The thing that amazed me was the smoothness of the rails. Like glass.
Anna - I actually thought of you when I posted it, because I know you like lines in photos.
photowannabe - Thanks. For some reason, your comment got flagged for moderation. I’m just now logging into my blog and replying to comments, so I didn’t see yours until very late.
I think it flagged it because your link is wrong. When I hover the mouse over it, it comes up as:
http://http.//allredmop.blogspot.com/
When it should be:
http://allredmop.blogspot.com/
I fixed this in an earlier comment you left. I’ll check for it in the future, too, but left it that way here so you can see what I’m talking about when you hover the cursor over your name.
I love the photo posts. I would really love your explanation on how you combine two separate shots with such skill. I’ve tried over the years without much sucess except when using a tripod, a lens shield, two exposures and my old AE-1.
Nice shots Mark. Great location too!
You may have a future as a railway photographer!
Looks like Monett. Am I close?
Lenny - Thanks. As a former shooter of the AE-1 (I had two bodies so I could shoot two different types of film at once), I gotta give you points.
I did use a tripod for the train pics above, by the way. Oh, and combining two shots is MUCH harder when you have to scan in the pictures. Things are harder to line up perfectly with that extra step in there. So, I’ve only ever done it digitally (except that one of the Redwoods in the Muir Woods).
That said, for this one I used the lasso selection tool (freehand selection) to select and copy part of one photo, then paste it into the other photo. I dragged it until it overlaid the right spot, then used the clone tool to smooth out the rough edges.
Mike - You nailed it! I held off mentioning the town because I figured you might have a guess. Too bad we didn’t know each other back when we lived there.