Being There.

Last week on my visit to Cork, I met with Ken Fox and Donncha Cronin, who are helping me with a book project on overseas rail travel.

During discussions about travel to wild and exotic places, Donncha says, “you might like my view. I don’t know, maybe you can do something with it?”

I’ve said this before, but you have to be there to get the photo.

It helps to have the right tools. In my case, I’d brought a full range of lenses to Cork, and based on my experience last year, I was prepared to make a long telephoto view at Glounthaune.

I wasn’t, however, expecting to make this elevated photograph of the rising sun. That was a bit of luck. Having inspected Donncha’s view, I decided, that ‘yes’, I might be able to work with that.

Fortunately, the next morning was mostly clear, and Irish Rail runs an intensive morning service with trains every half hour from Cobh and Midleton to Kent Station, Cork. (Cobh Junction is where the two lines join.)

With a copy of a working timetable in hand, and my Canon EOS 7D at the ready, I exposed this series of photos as the sun brightened the day.

One trick: I manually set the camera’s white balance to ‘daylight’ to avoid the camera trying to balance out the effect of the colored sunrise.

In addition to these digital photos, I made a couple of color slides.

This was only the auspicious beginning to another very productive day documenting railways around Cork. More to come in tomorrow’s post!

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