I got my Conrail Office Car Special train slides back recently. And does that thing look dark!
Even on films that show green nice like the Astia and Velvia that I shot it on, it was a literal black hole on all of the remotely normally exposed slides. This thing has got to be as hard to shoot as a shiny black steam engine. You get it in any nice neutral background and it all but disappears and you get it in front of some nice bright scene and you have a major contrast problem. The whole train being all the same dark Brunswick Green doesn't help either. The best looking shots were on Astia 100 a half stop over exposed from normal daylight (metered at 500 - F5.6 & 1/2, shot at F5.6) with the sky as most of the definitive background (300mm nosy telephoto passing UP powered WB coming into Willows interlocking - any brighter and the UP yellow would have washed out). One stop over flattens out everything else too much (yuk - over exposure) and my normal daylight exposures looking down off of an overpass on Conrail's medium brown colored ballast look great if it wasn't for the train in them. This thing is definitely a nice low sun angle end or beginning of the day type of shot. The contrast on the Velvia shots didn't help the depiction of this dark train either. Wasn't this whole train CR blue years ago? And I thought I saw an old shot in a Railfan & Railroad magazine where it was brown or tuscan (crossing a bridge over a river published about ten years ago?). Just out of curiosity, anyone know the heritage of the three E8s? Nice looking full dome in that train too. Fluted. Looks like an old Santa Fe car. It's interesting to think of what will happen to this equipment when the CSX/NS slip occurs if they keep any of this stuff. Just picture burgundy wine colored cars behind matching E-units... or oh boy, spartan black E-units with a white horse on them? I can do that from these CR shots now in Photoshop with a little effort. :) Did anyone else shoot this train on its recent trip into and out of East St. Louis? Dave Cohen Photographer [EMAIL PROTECTED] --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects
