Check out my most recent pod cast on the Trains Magazine Website.
http://trn.trains.com/photos-videos/2018/09/conversations-with-brian-solomon
Conversations with Brian Solomon, Episode 13
I chatted with Trains’ former Senior Graphic Designer Drew Halverson about train-watching and railroading. Topics include favorite paint schemes, the true meaning of the West, and what’s cool in modern railroading.
Tracking the Light Posts Daily, sometimes Twice!
The Railway Preservation Society of Ireland operated a steam charter last week using former Great Northern Railway engine 85 Merlin.
Rich afternoon sun and a colourful train made for easy photos at Killarney on 3 September 2018.
These views were among the digital photos I exposed with my FujiFilm XT1.
I was playing with scale and focus while working with the light to make the most of shadows.
Which is your favorite?
Learn more about the RPSI: https://www.steamtrainsireland.com
There’s a lightly used road bridge over Irish Rail’s old Great Northern line south of the former station at Mosney that offers a clean view in both directions.
The Irish Sea is in the distance to the east.
A week ago David Hegarty and I spent a few hours here making photos of passing trains.
I made these views using my FujiFilm XT1 fitted with a fixed focal length 27mm pancake lens, which offers an angle of view rough equivalent to a 41mm lens on a traditional 35mm film camera. In other words it is a slightly wide-angle perspective.
Look up, take in the heavens and transform a railway scene in to a cosmic image. That’s a theory anyway. During my 1994 visit to Montana, I was awed by the amazing skies for which the state is famous. Big sky and wide-open vistas can make for impressive railway images, yet getting the balance between right between atmosphere and railway is no easy chore. Here, I’m offering two of my most successful attempts. Both were exposed on Kodachrome 25 using my Nikon F3T. The peculiarities of Kodachrome’s spectral sensitivity made it a great medium for working with textural skies and dramatic lighting. Not only did Kodachrome 25 benefit from exceptional dynamic range, but also the way it translated blue light I found conducive to dramatic images featuring impressive skies.
While these slides look great when projected on a screen, and both were successfully reproduced in my 2005 book Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, I found they required a bit of adjustment using Adobe Photoshop to make them look good on the computer screen.
Different tools yield different results and I wonder how I might I use my Canon 7D or Lumix LX-3 in similar lighting situations.
