078 | Tracking the Light

Have you willingly deleted a railroad photo because of an exposure error? Or perhaps pitched an underexposed color slide? Maybe traded away a photo that you dismissed as substandard. Or maybe even dumped an entire roll into the trash because of a camera flaw?

I have.

Step back to August 1998. That wasn’t yesterday. Denis McCabe and I were photographing on the Northern Line at Balbriggan. Our aim was to catch cement trains on the move.

It was a mostly sunny afternoon with the occasional puffy cloud in the sky.

An inbound suburban train approached the platforms with Irish Rail 078 in faded orange paint leading a pair of Cravens and the requisite generator van.

Just as the train reached the optimal location for my photograph, the sun was suddenly blocked by a cloud. [Most of us familiar with making railway photographs has experienced this phenomena, and it has many names, most of them are unsuitable for reiteration here.]

Despite this setback, I released the shutter anyway, and exposed this lone 35mm black & white negative.

brian_solomon_663700 — This is the scaled scan of the otherwise unmodified black & white negative (made positive).

After I processed the film a few days later, I made prints from the best images on the roll, then sleeved all of the negatives: good, bad, and otherwise.

I never considered printing this one. At the time, seeing an 071-class diesel leading Cravens was not unusual. It happened daily. Nor was having a cloud ruin a photo in Ireland especially unusual.

I scanned the entire roll in November 2015, not for this photo, but for the better shots either side of it. It was only on close examination on the computer that it occurred to me that now, in 2016, this image is both interesting and historic.

Its lighting/exposure defect is easy enough to compensate for using Lightroom. So I present it to you now. In retrospect it offers a better lesson and a more interesting story than the perfectly lit images of cement trains exposed on the same roll.

Irish Rail class 071 General Motors diesel number 078 leads a pair of Cravens plus gen-van at Balbriggan in August 1998. Exposed on 35mm black & white film using a Nikon F2 (on a long-term loan from Brian Jennison) and Nikkor 24mm lens with yellow filter. Film processed in ID11, and image adjusted for exposure and contrast in Lightroom.

One more variation with greater contrast.

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One traditional school of thought when making photographs is capturing the ‘decisive moment.’

This moment is arbitrary, but in theory it is the instant in time when the elements in the composition are at their optimum relation to one another.

When I work with my old Rolleiflex to photograph moving trains this is a good philosophy. I’ll carefully consider all the elements in the frame, and wait, with shutter poised, until the train is at its optimum point, and ‘click.’

Some time later, often days or weeks later, I’ll process the film. Maybe I got what I was hoping to capture, maybe not.

Such is not the case with my Fujifilm X-T1. The relative cost of exposing one digital frame versus a dozen is inconsequential as compared to film. While the ability of the camera to make a burst of images rapid has completely altered the way I consider my compositions and expose photos.

I’ll still study the scene and look at all the elements. Typically I’ll make a few test photos to check sharpness, exposure and how different focal lengths alter the scene.

But when the train arrives, instead of exposing one photograph, or in the case of my old slide camera a few ‘motor drive’ dupes, I’ll might make a burst of images all the while adjusting my framing to subtly alter the composition. More is better, right?

Then after the fact I can decide which image I like best. I can erase the rest.

Below are five similar views made within seconds of each other. These portray an Irish Rail perway train working the quad track in suburban Dublin. Operation of this particular train is sporadic, and making photographs of it require knowledge, planning and patience.

When it finally came into view, I wanted to be sure I made the best possible photo that shows the train in its environment. Which one do you like the most?