One Image, One Story: Evening Autorack

One of the fun parts of accumulating a large number of photos over decades of photography is occasionally trolling through the archives and finding something that was missed during initial review of images. I find that sometimes I just overlook something because I was too focused on something else that had excited me at the time. Other times I didn’t have the necessary skill set to make the most of an image. Still other times, I get too wrapped up in the idea of technical perfection that I pass over photos that may not meet my normal technical requirements but sometimes make up for it in other ways. I think all three apply to me skipping over this one the first time I looked through images from this evening.

The first part of passing this one by was the fact that I was absolutely enamored with this photo taken a bit earlier in the evening a further east on the Pueblo Sub:

Honestly, I still am enamored with this shot. I love having a thin slice of light through the clouds and I like how the train and the setting sun balance each other on the panoramic format. I was so excited by this shot that I only gave a cursory glance to everything else taken this evening.

The second factor — not having the requisite skillset — also played a factor. I needed to do a lot of work with tonalities and dodging and burning to get the image to a place that I like it. That’s something I’ve really been working on more as I noted in this blog post. When I initially looked through these images, I still mostly did processing on a global scale. There really wasn’t a lot of local enhancements done in my work at the time. More and more, though, I’m finding local enhancements are the way to really bring an image to life, though.

Finally, there’s the fact that this shot is far from perfect. The falling light levels left me at 1/80th at f4 and ISO 1600. All three settings are a compromise and fail in some way. The shutter speed is almost but not quite good enough to stop a moving train. The aperture — only one stop from wide open on my 80-200mm — leaves a lot to be desired for depth of field. The ISO used yields a lot of grain and not a lot of exposure range. Adjusting any one of those parameters would have thrown the delicate balance out of equilibrium, though and I would have no shot.

Three and a half years later, I’m pretty happy with the decisions I made for exposure because they allowed me to get a photo. No, it’s definitely not going to win any technical perfection awards. The thing is, though, the photo conveys a sense of time and place because of those deficiencies. I look at this and I remember what that evening was like. I remember chasing this train wondering if I could get a decent photo of it in the quickly fading light. I remember still being on a high from the other image. I remember being mostly alone with only the occasional sound of a passing car over on US50 and enjoying that feeling as if I was the only one privileged to witness some beautiful railroad scenes on a nice March evening.

This was the last shot of the evening and I’m glad that I could relive the moment 3 1/2 years later and 1000 miles away. Creating the kinds of shots that allow me that kind of time and space travel are exactly why I love this hobby so much.