On January 16, 2010, I paid a visit to the Mid-Hants Railway in the UK.

I was relatively new to digital photography, having only acquired my first digital camera a few months earlier. This was a compact Lumix LX3. Originally, I anticipate using my first ‘Wee Lumix’ primarily for social photographs; snap shots of friends and family, and architectural studies of buildings in my travels.

However, not long after buying it, I experimented with the camera for railroad photos and found that I had a range of capabilities.

On this misty day visit to the Mid-Hants, I exposed dozens of images with my LX3. Although I simultaneously exposed in both RAW and JPG formats, in my early days I didn’t have advance image processing software, and so tended to primarily work with the in-camera JPGs.

Last night I decided to revisit my photos from January 16, 2010, and retrieve this selection from an old hard drive and processed the RAW files using DxO’s PureRaw4. This allows me to see the full image as captured by the camera, while correcting for a variety of lens defects. In situations where the camera’s zoom was at its wider setting this interpretation results in non-parallel edges to overcome barrel distortion and other defects.

Rather than crop the RAW images to rectangular format to match the JPGs, I’ve opted to show the full file which displays camera’s RAW capture that shows the whole field of view. This reveals detail at the edges of the image that has been hidden away all these years

Tracking the Light Looks Back!