Next up in my effort to post my recent photographic efforts is this series of shots taken from the Eola Road bridge which is at the east end of the Eola yard which is in the town of Eola, IL. Eolafan, this one’s for you!
I probably should have shot some of this on film. I think that shots with sun in the frame (even when it’s low on the horizon) are better handled by film, especially negative film that has huge dynamic range and practically infinite midtones. The K-5 did alright here, but I think that if I had brought my LX with Portra 160VC, I would have done even better. Alas, it was sitting in my Mom’s house since I rushed out to get out to my photo location. Oh well.
WOW, thanks CopCarSS…I really apprecaite the shots. I am very rarely up and out early enough to see such beautiful sunrises as that (except to walk to the end of our driveway to get hte morning newspaper and that’s usually before dawn). Thanks again!
Thanks for the kind words! I had noticed the sunrise possibilities when I was driving over the bridge to get on the tollway for my journey to Milwaukee. Alas, I didn’t have time to stop that morning, so I watched the weather hoping for another clear day at sunrise. I got one a few days later and scrambled out to the bridge to shoot what I had missed, earlier.
The biggest problem with this setup is that there are only a few places where I can shoot from on that bridge. The fence prevents me from moving around too much. I can only shoot at the gaps for the expansion joints on the bridge. I miss the days when there weren’t fences blocking cool views over bridges…
I don’t mind the power lines–in a way, they’re part of the infrastructure almost as much as railroads, and the railroads do a lot to make them useful. But that one thick wire in the foreground has got to go…
Chris, that’s great stuff! I don’t have the ambition to get up at the crack of dawn any more, but you make it work for me! Too bad you couldn’t get an over-under shot, but you apparently don’t have any better luck in getting CN to cooperate than I do!
I really like the first one, the power lines and signal boxes show off the part of railroading most never look at, the light brings out the detail of the signal bridge, detail all over the place, serious eye candy in a way.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I probably could have photo-chopped out the power lines especially the ones in the foreground the Carl mentioned, but I tend to lean more towards a journalistic approach to photography. I usually don’t get too crazy in post-processing my shots. Sometimes that means leaving stuff like power lines in photos. Just a personal preference thing, I think.
Power lines and all the assorted hardware is what you should see in a yard…
Folks get hung up on the open prairie wedge shot look, and tend to forget all the rest of the stuff needed to move trains…no one would even bat an eye at say, telegraph poles along a main line, they expect to see them there, even though they have been gone for almost 40 plus years.
North yard where I work has been there since 1924, I would hate to be the electrician that had to chase down a problem, no real “code” existed way back then, so wires run all over the place, under and around things, overhead across tracks, through odd culverts and such, we even have a on property sub-station with its own auxiliary generator, a night mare of wires everywhere.
It would look odd to me if they were not there if you get my meaning…after all, it is an “industrial” area of sorts, right?
I love all the “junk” in the photos, some of it I have never seen in detail before, like the switch heaters, we don’t have them down here, so they are interesting to me…
I like the one with the BNSF and the entire transmission tower in the background. It gives the train some context, plus the LED numberboards match up with the color of the sun, somewhat.
Chris, 2 [tup] [tup]!! Those are fantastic shots you managed to get that morning! You always do a fantastic job on your pictures, and I really do enjoy seeing your pictures that you share with us here on trains.com. Seeing the sunlight on the rails, turning them golden are so breathtaking!! Excellent job, as always, IMHO.
