Six years before I started working for Chessie as their company photog, the railroad hired some free-lance professional photographers to shoot "picture trains" of freshly painted equipment. On several of the staged photo runbys, these folks (a husband and wife team) used a 24mm lens with motor drive button fully depressed in the "machine gun mode" as the train approached the camera. On each of the numerous rolls of their runby photos, slide frames 1 through 36 showed the train getting a little closer in each subsequent exposure. Without fail, on each roll they ran out of film with the locomotive still a car length or two away from the camera, with this distance being exaggerated even more with the wide angle lens! So we had very, very few photos of a Chessie train near the camera, and, consequently, you always saw the same Chessie train photo in brochures. I gave it Chessie photo file number 75-0820 TT20, and never will forget this number as I pulled this one good slide and then refiled it about a million times. Chessie never ran a picture train the entire time I worked in Cleveland, so we sent out photos of this lash-up of five GP7s pulling a train--real modern stuff (!), especially in light of the fact that 3 out of 5 of these diesels had already been scrapped as I sent out the photos.
When I started the monumental task of organizing the Chessie photo files (it took me three years between road trips and other photo work!), I threw away thousands of useless photos, including about 200 slides of the aforementioned "too-soon" slides made by these professional photographers. They must have been good at shooting weddings or portraits, 'cause they didn't know squat about shooting train photos! They couldn't get one good shot with a motor drive and a full roll of film each of the six times they attempted it, so don't any of you feel bad about being a little too quick on the trigger! Just remember that the train's size increases proportionately with the square of the distance to the camera, which means that the damn thing gets really BIG, really FAST the closer it gets to you. And when the train looks good in the viewfinder, it already is too late to get the shot as your best reaction time of 1/10th second to push the shutter button is too slow to "freeze" what you are seeing. The 60 m.p.h. train will have moved 8.8 feet during your body's 1/10th-second reaction time alone, and will already be past the "height of action" when the camera shutter trips. As with sports photography before the invention of the motor drive, you have to anticipate the action and actually trip the shutter before the action reaches its peak. But nowadays we have it easy, so use a motor drive and start machine-gunning early, but not too early. Words of encouragemnet from John B. Corns --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 2409
