Heck, in order to make my photos different from everyone else's photos, I purposely try to get headlight flares! The more flare glare, the better, I say. I breathe on the lens, shoot at small apertures to create headlight stars, aim the camera at the sun or ditch lights, and use zoom lenses with complex glass groupings (e.g. Nikon 50~300mm) to get internal lens flares for interesting effects. At other times you will see me using long bellows lens hoods, black aluminum foil, gobos or just my hand to block light from hitting my front optic--it just depends on the effect I want with that particular subject.
I have never sat down and shot side-by-side comparisons of headlight flare with differing brands of film, as I have used Fuji VelVeeta almost exclusively for nearly ten years, and I made the change from old friend Kodachrome in an instant (while playing the Vapors song "Turning Japanese" on a boombox at the office for maximum effect!). I do remember getting a beautiful peach-colored glow around headlights with K-64 on sunny days with a back-lighted diesel that I no longer get with Fuji Cheezychrome. I am attempting to create drama and produce a memorable photo that jumps out at you and grabs you by the eyeballs. I do not give a hang about a lot of conventional concerns that most railfan photographers have, because I am not trying to record the subject (let's say, a train) with absolutely dead-on color rendition or devoid of some visual effect through the creative application of lenses of differing focal lengths. In the old days of the early 1970s we had to have extremely accurate color rendition of clients' products (say, bricks or bathroom tiles) for a catalog, so we shot them on CC-filtered 4x5 color negative film, and then hauled the bricks (or whatever) to the photo lab so that their printers could match the colors in the prints as closely as possible to the original bricks. It is what the client needed, but, boy, was that ever boring to me. Those rectangular photos of each brick color/texture reproduced in the catalogs did not reach out and grab my eyeballs, but maybe they grabbed the eyeballs of some architect or some other person in the construction business. I doubt it very much. I vowed that if I ever got out of that place I would attempt to be as creative as possible with my photos, so some headlight flare does not bother me. If all I am going to do with my camera is record the scene exactly as it appears (as if that were possible!), then I would be nothing more than a mirror of reality. That would be extremely boring for me as my purpose in life is to be creative, whether it be with a camera, paintbrush, keyboard, or just my thoughts. Like with the bricks, at times one must record exactly what one sees for the client, but I always do my best work when I am my own client. So most times you will find me off in another spot away from the crowd, climbing up on something high, crawling on my belly in the mud or wading through the water in order to find that different spot where all visual elements come together to make a great photo. Most times my cameras and I get filthy, or wet or scratched in getting to these new vistas, and then sometimes I see that the shot will not be as great as I had thought it would be. That's OK, as I have eliminated one more possible angle for my photo and can concentrate on getting the shot from another location...maybe over here so that I can get a little more headlight flare. John B. Corns --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 4719
