Hello Old Friend.
On, October 15, 2014, I was giving a tour to some visitors from France, and we passed through Ware on our way from the Quabbin Reservoir to West Brookfield’s Salem Cross Inn.
Earlier in the week, I’d noticed that Mass-Central had parked its rare Electro-Motive Division model NW5 2100 in Ware yard near the Route 9/32 overpass. So, we made a quick diversion so that I could make a photograph of the locomotive.
I’ve written about this before, but it was about 1981, when I rode my bicycle from Monson to Ware, specifically to photograph this locomotive, which had then just recently been delivered to Mass-Central.
When I think about all the locomotives that have come and gone in that time, I can’t help but smile. Old 2100 has nine lives, and then some! And it’s not that I need another photograph of it, but I make them anyway.
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Interesting that HDR via 3 sequential digital images does not work like the dynamic range for film. This can be fixed in post, but that’s a lot of work to make a mask, change the gamma selectively, etc., etc. Film sim[ly has an inherent greater dynamic range for illuminance and color contrast — about 3-4 stops for modern positive color films and 7-8 stops for negative color films (which are today designed to be scanned). All current digital sensors (actually the sensors are analog, the processing is digital) have less than 1/3 stop tolerance, which is why it is much more important to expose accurately with a digital camera than a film camera. That’s what the histogram is for — something you can’t get with a film camera, nor is it needed for film until scanned. Shooting a high contrast picture on film, and then scanning it to yield a digital image, is often more efficient than exposing an HDR image and futzing afterwards — that is if you really care about the results.
I don’t know anything of the railroad’s plans for it. It was the first time I’d seen the locomotive in about a year. Since the GP38s entered service in autumn last year, this engine has been elusive.
It’s Fall, damn it… I like the one with the vibrant color! I’ll have to get out to see this… surely they don’t plan to leave it here, unprotected?