On a September 1994 trip with Tom and Mike Danneman, I made this unusual portrait oriented (vertical) image on Kodachrome 25 of a Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range manifest freight approach the yard at Proctor, Minnesota.
It was dull and raining lightly. To make for a more engaging photo I included portions of the bridge on which was I standing over the tracks. This makes a frame for the primary subject and ads depth, while distracting viewers likely to complain by directing their interest to the out of focus bridge members and away from the featureless sky.
This was a trick I learned in the early 1990s when executing commercial product photography to avoid overly complicated re-shoots by distracting fault-finding art directors.
Tracking the Light Posts Daily!
Cropped for the horizontal-demanding internet below;
Guitarist Jimmy Page, best known for his work with Led Zeppelin and the Yard Birds, produces a daily web page (http://www.jimmypage.com) that chronicles his work over more than five decades.
On This Day picks an event (or two) and gives Jimmy’s viewers a bit of background, often describing the roles of his fellow musicians. On occasion he drops in a railway photo or a clip from an old movie. Jimmy often carried a Nikon SLR on his tours.
Today, I’ll borrow Jimmy’s format: on this day 22 years ago (23 September 1994) I was traveling with Tom and Mike Danneman in the Minnesota Iron Range.
At the time I was working with Tom at Pentrex Publishing in Waukesha, Wisconsin where we produced Pacific RailNews and Passenger Train Journal. Mike worked across town at Kalmbach’s Trains Magazine.
I learned a lot from our Midwestern excursions in the mid-1990s. Both of these brothers remain among the most talented railway photographers and artists in North America. Tom now works at Kalmbach, while Mike is a freelance artist based in Colorado.
Among our destinations on 23 September 1994 was Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range’s Fairlane facility, where in a thick fog we photographed this pair of SDM diesels with an iron ore train.
I exposed this classic Kodachrome 25 view at Fairlane, Minnesota using a Nikon F3T with an f1.8 105mm lens. My aperture was nearly wide open and as a result the headlights burned out a bit. I’ve always liked the way the loading equipment looms ominously in the fog. The leaning signal is a bit of distraction though.
Later in the day we visited Hibbing, Minnesota, which is probably best known as the boyhood home of Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan).
