Tag Archives: #Fujichrome

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San Diego Trolley

In early June 2008, I made a day trip to San Diego from Long Beach, California. This involved a drive on the infamous LA freeways and a relaxing journey on Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner from Irvine to the old Santa Fe Depot.

I spent several hours exploring the San Diego Trolley system.

At the Santee Town Center, I made this view on Fujichrome using a Canon EOS-3 with 24mm lens.

I scanned the slide yesterday and processed the TIF scan using Lightroom. The top version involved some nominal contrast control to make the most of the original photo.

In the bottom image, I dramatically boosted saturation and other color controls to make the image bounce out of the screen, whack you upside the head, before quietly retreating into a mild levitation of exaggerated colors—you know just in case the red trolley wasn’t red enough on its own.

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Announcements, photography, Rail transit marathon, Tips and Technique

J-Church

On a bright morning in June 2008, I made this view of a San Francisco MUNI Breda lightrail car working the J-Church route in-bound on its namesake street.

At the time, I was researching my book Railroads of California for Voyageur Press.

In recent days, I’ve been going through dozens of rolls of Fujichrome slides that I’d exposed during my Spring 2008 visit to California to organize and catalog them. This includes a variety of photo of San Francisco MUNI, including the light rail and cable cars.

Fujichrome slide exposed using a Canon EOS-3 with 24mm Canon lens.

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Dublin’s Pearse Station, Spring 1998.

Twenty-Five years ago, I was exploring Irish Rail, and seeing this amazing railway for the first time. 

Dublin’s Pearse Station impressed me. The capacious Victorian train shed with a mix of electric and diesel trains reminded me of Philadelphia’s great termini; Broad Street and Reading Terminal.

But also because it was the oldest big city station in continuous use. The station opened in 1834 and although greatly altered over the decades, this had always served as a Dublin hub.

Today, it is rare to find a diesel here, except on permanent-way trains, and more rarely on RPSI diesel tours. Yet, back in 1998, it was a common sight to find a 201-class General Motors diesel-electric working a push-pull Mark3 set in suburban service. The sound of the big GM was amplified under the shed.

Irish Rail 231 at Dublin Pearse Station in 1998. Fujichrome slide scanned with a Nikon LS5000 scanner.

I made this photo on Fujichrome Sensia (100 ISO) using a Nikon F3T with 24mm Nikkor wide-angle lens. Looking at this photo today, it amazes me how few people were on the platform.

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Köln Hbf—Aug 1998.

Working with a 1960s era Nikkor f2.8 135mm lens on a Nikon F3T, I made this view of DB passenger trains from beneath the arched trainshed at the Köln Hauptbahnhof (Cologne, Germany).

It was a hot day in August 1998. The camera was loaded with Fuji Sensia 100 color slide film, an emulsion that I found to be well suited to the soft light of German summer. This rendered the colors well, especially DB red, while handling the extreme contrast.

The slide was scanned using a Nikon LS5000 slide scan powered by VueScan 9.7.99 software. Set at: 64 bits per pixel (64 bit RGB), scan resolution 4000 dots per inch, fine mode, color profile ‘white balance’ and output as a TIF file. Minor corrections were implemented in post processing using Lightroom version 5.5.

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photography, Tips and Technique

Shinjuku Station, Tokyo 1997

I made this view in the blue light of dusk on an April evening in April 1997 at Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku Station.

At the time it was the busiest railway junction station in the world, handling more daily passengers that even London’s famous Clapham Junction.

I have used this photograph and others from my 1997 visit in a variety of publications over the last 25 years.

I exposed the photo on Fujichrome with my Nikon N90S mounted on a tripod. I was emulating a style of railway photography popular in the the Japanese magazines at the time which used the extreme blurring of a train through a scene to infer motion.

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Misty Morning at East Portal

October 1, 2004: in time-honored fashion, I followed a westward Guilford Rail System freight from the yard at East Deerfield to the east portal of the Hoosac Tunnel.

The river valleys were filled with autumn mist. I arrived at the grade crossing near the tunnel portal several minutes ahead of the freight (symbol WARJ).

As the roar of the EMD diesels grew closer, morning sun began to clear the mist making for cosmic lighting effects.

I exposed a series of Fujichrome slides using a Nikon F3 fitted with f2.8 180mm lens. I calculated my exposure manually using a Minolta Mark4 light meter, as I typically did with the F3.

I scanned these slides last night using an Epson V600 scanner with Epson Scan 2 software.

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Amtrak at Oakland

On an afternoon in August 2009, I stood atop a parking garage near Jack London Square in Oakland, California where I made this view featuring an Amtrak Capitols train against a backdrop of the city’s sprawling port facilities.

I was working with a Canon EOS3 fitted with a 100-400mm zoom lens to expose a Fujichrome slide. This was several months before buying my first digital camera.

During my five week stay in California that year I exposed more than 80 rolls of color slide film. Many of my photos featured scenes around San Francisco Bay. At the time I envisioned writing a book on San Francisco, but I didn’t get sufficient interest from my publishers at the time to move that proposal forward.

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Rainy Day at Tobyhanna

In October 2005, I traveled with Delaware-Lackawanna’s PT98 that operated from Scranton to Slateford Junction, Pennsylvania.

At Tobyhanna the eastward freight stopped to switch, and I made a few photos on Fujichrome using a Nikon F3. It was pouring rain, so I made the best of it.

I scanned this image using a Nikon Coolscan 5000, and adjusted the TIF raw file in Adobe Lightroom to correct the color temperature and color balance while adjusting contrast and shadow detail.

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Stuttgart, Germany June 1999.

I made a brief visit to Stuttgart during a trip to Germany and Switzerland in 1999.

On my first afternoon in Stuttgart, I exposed this Fujichrome Sensia II (ISO 100) color slide of a classic tram ascending away from the city center. Notice the effects of cross lighting. (The sun is to the left of the camera).

At the time I was working with an N90s with 80-200mm zoom lens, my standard camera combination for the period.

I’ve found that different types of equipment lend to different sorts of compositions. I wonder what images I would have made in Stuttgart if I could have carried the Nikon Z6 that I own today?

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Thalys Departing Brussels Midi

On a whirlwind trip to Belgium, France and Germany in Spring 1999, I made this long telephoto image of the high-speed Thalys departing Brussels Midi for Paris.

I was working with my original Nikon N90S that I’d bought secondhand from Mike Gardner two years earlier fitted with a Tokina 400mm fixed telephoto that I bought from Doug Moore in the early 1990s. 

Most unusual was I was working with a short-lived slide film emulsion sold as Fujichrome MS 100/1000 that offered variable ISO through push/pull processing.

I’d rated this film at ISO 200, which gave me an extra stop over the Fujichrome Sensia II (ISO 100) that I normally used. Fuji offered processing for this film that came with a special mailer on which you would tick a box to select the desired ISO for processing.

The lighting was also unusual: it had been raining, but shafts of diffused sun light were peaking through heavy fast moving clouds.

400mm view at Brussels Midi in March 1999.

The effect of the 400mm lens compressed the complex array of track on approach to the busy Brussels terminal.

Enlarged portion of the above photo to show grain structure and detail.

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Roscrea at Dusk

On the evening of November 27, 2003, I used my old Contax G2 rangefinder to expose this Fujichrome Sensia color slide of Irish Rail’s Nenagh Branch train departing Roscrea, County Tipperary.

This was toward the end of regular locomotive hauled trains on the branch. A few weeks later Irish Rail’s 2700-series diesel railcars would assume most of the runs on this branch, although locomotives with sets Cravens carriages would still occasionally make an appearance on the line into 2004.

Contax G2 with 45mm Zeiss lens.

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photography, Rail transit marathon, Tips and Technique

Toronto Transit Commission—Two Photos from Ten Years Ago.

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In February 2010, I visited Toronto, Ontario with photographers Pat Yough and Chris Guss.

It was extra cold, but we made some stunning photos in the clear frosty light.

These view of TTC CLRVs (Canadian Light Rail Vehicles) were exposed using a Canon EOS-3 and Fujichrome slide film.

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