For my 11th birthday in October 1977, my father presented me with a Leica 3A rangefinder. Two months later, we were visiting my grand parents in New York City, and we took a trip over to Queens to photograph trains.

Among the places that we stopped was at Woodside Avenue, where I made a sequence of 35mm photos with the Leica of passing Long Island Railroad third-rail multiple units on the six-track line running toward Penn Station. We are looking toward the New York City Transit Authority’s Flushing Line.

I processed this roll of Kodak Tri-X in our kitchen sink using a mix of Kodak Microdol-X developer.

In 1980, I used a version of this photo to help illustrate my Junior High Science Fair project titled Electrified Railroads in the United States, which earned me second place in the competition. Since that time, this strip of negatives had sat in the dark in a group of my early negatives. I scanned it last week and imported the hi-res scan into Adobe Lightroom for cropping and contrast adjustment.

Considering, I was only 11 years old, I think I made a pretty effective composition.

Tracking the Light looks back!