4 Random Shots

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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3 are some film scans that I finally got around to doing, and one is a shot taken a couple of nights ago.

First the scanned shots. You’ll have to excuse these scans. I’m new to scanning, and I’m doing the scans with a flatbed scanner. Needless to say, that has led to less than perfect results. These pictures aren’t sharp at all, and the colors are really wild on them. I think I had better practice at this quite a bit more…

Anyways, first up is a meet on the Limon Sub a little east of Denver:

Next up is a shot of a BNSF train on the Moffat Sub at Rocky:

And here is a sunset shot on the Limon Sub. I think this was with my old Canon FDn 20mm f2.8. I forgot how much fun that lens was.

Lastly, here’s a shot taken the other night. When I saw this shot originally, the clouds in the background were dark and ominous. Alas!, by the time I grabbed the camera, they weren’t quite so threatening. Still, I think this made a pretty decent B&W, though I could probably punch the contrast up a bit more.

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I enjoyed viewing your photos. Thanks for sharing them with us.

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Scanned or not, dude, your random shots look better than my best-of-shoots! Good show. - a.s.

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Nice, as always. Wish I got more opportunities…

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Chris, do you ever post anything on webshots.com? You should, so I could select them to use on my desktop.

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Nice shots, nothing wrong with letting nature take center stage occasionally.

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Excellent shots, Chris. I love that B&W one. The sunset one is very nice also. Scanning takes practice… I’ve tried it with less than stellar results. Thanks for sharing, again, Chris, great photos as usual…

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Chris,

I liked the sunset pics,the color looked good in all of them to me…I liked the B&W also but Im wandering what effect are you trying to achieve…I think scanners are all alike unless you happend to have several thousand $ lying around to get one like Wal Mart or somebody…[2c]

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Actually, if you stay in the 35mm size range, good film scanners are not killer expensive, at least not so much as they used to be. Even medium format scanners have gotten much better while coming down in price somewhat. Like anything else, they take a little getting used to, but they can do some pretty nice conversions.

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…Chris…That 3rd shot is georgeous…! Dramatic for sure.

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Thanks, everyone, for the very kind comments.

I played with the scanner a little bit more last night, and I’m getting a little closer to dialing it in where I want it, but I’m still frustrated by a lack of sharpness (I had to do several strong passes of USM in Photoshop to get them looking even close to sharp at web resolution) and by the colors. The colors seem to either be inaccurate, insanely oversaturated, or both.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m trying to use a flatbed scanner for doing film scans. When I bought this scanner last year, it was the only thing remotely affordable that could handle film scans of my 4x5 chromes/negs. While I’ve been somewhat happy with B&W film scans from it, I’m not overly thrilled about how 4x5 chrome shots look on it, either. I’ve been working on a scan of Balanced Rock in Arches N.P. with some Mammatus clouds in the background. It’s simply breathtaking on the light table, but I can’t get the scan of it to work. (Here is the digital shot I used to meter the 4x5 exposure. I used Velvia in the 4x5, though, and the picture has so much more depth, detail and color to it (and the light was better), that the digital shot can’t come close to equalling it.)

I think I may need to consider investing in a 35mm film scanner. At least I can start scanning my large 35mm collection decently, then. I guess I’ll have to stick with getting drum scans of the 4x5 stuff in order to share them. Alas, that’s kind of an expensive proposition, too…

At any rate, per your specific questions:

Brian - I haven’t uploaded anything there, but if there’s something that you want for a desktop, let me know what resolution you want it at, and I’ll send it your way.

Danny - The effect I was trying to achieve is called “salvaging a shot that didn’t work,” LOL. When I saw the train sitting at Tennyson Street originally, storm

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I’ll browse through your galleries and get back to you tonight. I’ll try very hard to make the list as short as possible.[swg]

One of the features of Webshots was the ability of its wallpaper/screensaver manager to incorporate your own pictures into the mix. Up until a month ago, I did have some of my own shots included in the random selection, but that ended when my motherboard died and I ended up buying a new tower. I’ve transferred the hard drive from the old tower into the new one, but I haven’t gotten my pictures reorganized or Webshots reconfigured yet to do that again, but this will give me the incentive to get that done.

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Brian,

Sounds good, just let me know.

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Superb photography, I’ve saved all of them in my album.

Thanks for sharing these excellent photographs,

Wayne