#Mississippi Palisades State Park

In June 2010, I stood atop a bluff in the Mississippi Palisades Park at Savanna, Illinois and made this photo of a westward BNSF intermodal train working west along the former Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. A Mississippi River barge was working up river and in the distance is a highway bridge and beyond is the former Milwaukee Road, now operated by Canadian Pacific.

I was using a Canon EOS-3 loaded with Fujichrome Provia 100F and fitted with a 100-400mm zoom. Hazy summer light led to a predominant blue cast.

After scanning the slide to create a RAW file, I imported the photo into Adobe Lightroom where I made color and contrast corrections to result in a more natural looking and better balanced image.

Below are the uncorrected scan and the scan following post processing.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!

A long long time ago, back in the 1990s, I’d travel with Mike and Tom Danneman (and others) to the Mississippi River Valley to photograph the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy route to the Twin Cities.

Among our favorite vantage points were river-side bluffs in the Mississippi Palisades State Park north of Savanna, Illinois.

The line on the east bank was Burlington Northern back then. Today it is BNSF Railway (reflecting the 1995 merger between Burlington Northern and Santa Fe).

On a bright afternoon in July, John Gruber and I returned to this old haunt and put ourselves in position to make a few photographs.

As hoped, BNSF operated several trains, and we exposed views from the tops of the bluffs. I made these with my FujiFilm X-T1.

Any favorites?