Image editing is one of my favorite things to do…
Here’s one of my few triptychs, Then, Now, & Somewhere In Between.
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Engine_1988:
Sounds like you are happy with your camera. More power to you!
To Everyone:
My efforts to determine something personal through this thread were a resounding success! Thanks!
That success actually will save me thousands and thousands of dollars!
And behind the scenes I learned something radical about Firecrown and those at. Thanks Firecrown …
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Great!
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A whole lot of subjective stuff, here.
Photography is an art. To each their own. If your stuff pleases you, great. If it pleases others, better!
Learning what you like and how to create that is a journey worth taking.
Also, the equipment you have with you is the equipment that will capture your images. There are subjective tradeoffs. I’m not willing to tote a DSLR, so I do what I can with my phone (more and more!) and a super zoom Canon. I’m 99% satisfied.
I know what I like.
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I learned on B&W, rolled my own as a HS Annual photographer. Developed my own. Printed my own.
Weston light meter, Hexacon 35mm SLR, Early Minolta 35mm SLR (SR-1?) with several lenses, Rollieflex, tripod, carried it all with me everywhere I went.
Learned a lot.
Gave up eventually, as none of that belonged to me.
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I appreciate the art in taking good photographs.
Sometimes there are only seconds to take a picture and hope for the best.
I then had a minute to board my train
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Oh my, I used to collect those large folding cameras and their “Little brothers”. Used them too, and they’d really sing when used with their limitations in mind.
The Kodak stopped making film for them in the 1980s so I had to shelve them. Too bad, it was fun seeing people’s reactions when I pulled out one of my antiques!
I’ve still got them but the time’s coming when I’m going to pass them on to someone else, I’ve had them long enough.
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I think I had a Weston light meter when I was using my folding 620 film camera!
My SLR had Pentax mount lenses. Screwed on. Used to be envious of the Minolta bayonet.
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To pivot a bit, getting all those old slides and negatives into the digital age is a whole 'nuther learning curve. Guys like Flannery and Barry are really wizards.
I’ve had fun trying to bring my Dad’s old faded Ansco-chrone’s back from the dead. Sometimes it’s a bridge too far. I’ll try to post a “before and after” in a bit.
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From the August 1955 NMRA Convention. My dad’s old Anco slide. My attempt to drag it back from the dead with Photoshop Elements.
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The Hexacon was East German, logos ground off, Hexacon label glued on, imported by some outfit in NY, fitted with Brit lense. You do snow shots at Mammoth, crank it down to F-22, the iris did not stay wide until you hit the shutter. Had to barrel sight across the top.
HEXACON ZI I think that’s it.
Height of the cold war, early 60’s, NOBODY had East German stuff.
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I started off with an old Praktina (not Praktica) that I got from my uncle. No internal light meter and you had to move a lever on the lens side to open up the aperture to view. I learned a lot with that camera. My next one was a Nikkormat FT2, that got stolen. I got a good insurance payout and ended up with a Nikon N8008. I thought that I’d died and gone to heaven, Now, all I use is my Samsung S10e. I donated my slided to Morning Sun and never looked back. Even with them shutting down, my (meager) work has a much larger audience than I could give it. The bad thing was that being from the Detroit area, I was competing with Em Gulash as to whose slides to use to illustrate something and he almost always won, for good reason!
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Or kind of a nut maybe? Reminds me of the famous guitar player who insisted his roadies only put one brand of 9V battery in his devices (like wah-wah pedals or compression boxes etc.) because he said he could hear the difference caused by using another brand of battery.
If this silver change -whenever it actually happened - was really a big deal, it would have been a subject in Trains and Railfan and other railroad magazines, and in books about real and model railroad photography. But it wasn’t.
p.s. a number of the “great masters of railroad photography” continued taking photos past the 1970s, stopping only when they died or faced serious health issues. I know a few photographers from steam days quit taking pictures when the railroads went all-diesel, but not because of problems developing their photos.
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Sweet! This is what attracts non train riders to try the train.
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In the 1980s I considered Zone VI to be for photography what Carver was to audiophile tech. I find I still think of the name with some awe.
For those not familiar with Fred Picker:
There are plenty of great railroad photographs being taken now; but many “prints” never get printed, instead they are posted on websites, Facebook pages, etc. Lots of folks pooh pooh Facebook, but it is a treasure trove of railroad pictures scanned from sources never made public before.
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Yep, social media is here to stay whether you like it or not. That’s where all the young creative people are now. If you don’t have a presence on social media, you simply do not exist to most people under 40. More and more of the train hobby needs to come to terms with that. It is what it is.
I’m (sort of) the exception, though. These forums–plus the occasional Youtube video–are as close as I get to being a social media user.
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