Last summer, I made a series a variations on a back-lit photograph that I’d exposed looking west at Shelley Drive near Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania.
The other evening, Kris, Seamus-the-Dog and I returned to this location to catch a pair of AmtrakKeystone trains. In post processing. I repeated the exercise with one of Nikon files of the second train (Amtrak 656).
For me this has special significance: One of the last serious conversations I had with my father on photography was regarding last summer’s sequence. He had preferred the hard, unprocessed silhouette compared with my more interpretive digital interpretations.
Since that time, I’ve found some his black & white negatives exposed in the same vicinity more than sixty year earlier. I’m sorry that I cannot share any these photos with him.
Below are five variations of my image, plus a surprise . . .
Amtrak Keystone 656 at Shelley Drive; constrast, color temperature, exposure and highlights/shadows altered for cosmetic interpretation.Amtrak Keystone 656 at Shelley Drive; heavy constrast, color temperature, exposure and highlights/shadows altered, plus a mask applied to the sky for heavy adjustment to alter appearance. Amtrak Keystone 656 at Shelley Drive, NEF file converted to DNG file with lens correction and nominal contrast adjustment, but without heavy cosmetic adjustment or interpretation. Scaled from the Nikon NEF file.Amtrak Keystone 656 at Shelley Drive, NEF file converted to DNG file with lens correction and nominal contrast adjustment, followed by additional cosmetic alterations to contrast, exposure, color temperature and shadow/highlight changes.Did you spot the bird? [Upper left to the left of the catenary poles]. Initially, I thought this might be an errant bit of dust on my Nikon’s sensor. Only after extreme enlargement did I notice that this was in fact a bird in flight. Not a bird in hand, but one in the sky. Sometimes details matter.
