Tag Archives: #Belt Railway of Chicago

photography, Tips and Technique

Clearing Yard Silhouette.

Clearing Yard sunset

On July 1, 1995, I spent the day with Sean Graham-White who had organized a visit at Belt Railway of Chicago’s sprawling Clearing Yard on the southside of Chicago in order to research a detailed article for Pacific RailNews.

At the time, I was associate editor of the magazine and living in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Toward the end of the day, I made this silhouette looking west using my Nikon F3T with 200mm f4.0 Nikkor telephoto. Kodachrome 200, was a grainy film that allowed me to use a faster shutter speed. Notice the plane on approach to Chicago’s Midway Airport.

The inspiration for this image was a photo exposed about 29 years earlier by John Gruber that had appeared on the cover of Trains Magazine.

I made a three-pass scan of this image last night using our recently refurbished Nikon LS-5000 slide scanner controlled by VueScan software.

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photography

Classic Chrome: Clearing Yard—July 1995.

In July 1995, Sean Graham-White organized for him us to research a story about the Belt Railway of Chicago’s expansive Clearing Yard. We spent two days with the aid of an assistant train master photographing and taking detailed notes.

At the time I was an Associate Editor of Pacific RailNews, and the story appeared in the magazine later that year.

Among the dozens of color slides I exposed was this view showing a collection of antique Electro-Motive diesels.

It was a hot, humid summer’s afternoon, and the light was something less than ideal for Kodachrome.

I’ve scanned and digitally processed this slide to make the most of the image.

This included considerable color correction and contrast adjustment.

Below is the scaled, but unadjusted scan; the Adobe Lightroom work window showing the degree of some adjustments to the original scan, and my final adjusted output.

Unadjusted Kodachrome slide scan. Note heavy cyan-color cast.

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