>Rick Newton's UP 9183 and his SP shot at Tennessee Pass (both verticals) >are compositions which I like a lot, but I don't like the reddish color of >the Kodak E-6 films that he used.
Well Dave, I'm glad you like those shots, 'cause so do I. I liked the Utah location so much in fact, that I damn near missed my flight out of Salt Lake, considering I was about 75 miles away, and a mad dash got me there 10 minutes prior to departure. Vertical shots were not compositionally easy for me to get in the habit of doing, it just wasn't natural. When I forced myself to do it, simply for the fact that I needed some variety, I found that trains linear lines work well in a vertical format, and I was smitten. I almost got to the point I was forcing myself to shoot everything vertically. Although this isn't really a good idea, it allowed me to digest information about composition and when is a good time to shoot vertically and when not to, to acheive the best results. The biggest finding was, that typically, vertical shots do not work well from ground level, but there are exceptions, one being the Echo Canyon shot. Unfortunately time is not on my side right now at work, so I can't get into details of what does work, but of course, we could try and "debate" what does make a good vertical. One other point I would like to make when it comes to composition. When I started out in rail photography, my main goal was to shoot all kinds of trains. I travelled to different locations, mostly because I couldn't shoot some of the railroads locally. As time went by, my shooting habits became such that the main goal was to shoot a train in its environment. I went to new locations to shoot the scenery that the train was in. In other words, I am shooting a picture of a scene, and there just happens to be a train in the middle of it. Sometimes, in disagreement with Charlie, is that the train is not the focal point of the picture. I find that even non-rail enthusiasts can enjoy my images, because the picture conveys more than just a train. A good example of this is the Tennessee Pass shot, or Marcia Lucas' shot of the work extra up in the Great North. Don't get me wrong, many of my favorite images are extreme telephoto shots, the 'in your face" variety, where the focus is very definitely the train. This brings me to one last point about shooting a train in its environs. Trains run in all kinds of weather, and depicting a particular scene may very well be in the middle of a horrendous thunderstorm, fog, night, overcast, hazy, whatever. Because time constraints have become a problem, I find myself going out in less than ideal conditions less and less, something I need to change. One thing I really like about Charlie D.'s photgraphy, is that he will shoot in any conditions. I remember a recent conversation, "Hey Rick, I'm thinking about going to Oklahoma this weekend to shoot some Santa Fe, wanna tag along? I said " Charlie, its supposed to raining cats and dogs, and the thunderstorms are supposed to be bad." He says, "Won't that be cool though, imagine the pictures we'd come back with!" I thought about it for a second, and realized he was right. If it wouldn't have been a 400+ mile trip to get to OK and the Santa Fe, and only two days to do it in, I would've gone. And as for the film, I'm always playing around with the different film types. The Minturn shot was on LPZ (Lumiere) and the Utah shot on Kodak Elite II 100 shot at EI160. I like the look of Kodachrome alot, but I seldom used it, because I thought it was always a little flat, and I had to wait a week to get my film back. Both of these films had a look very similar to Kodachrome, although as I discovered later, they both are far too warm. I am back to shooting the more neutral Fuji films almost all of the time now. (When I can shoot) Rick Newton -> SPORRS: 'Serious Photographers Of Railroad Related Subjects' -> Web Site: http://www.anet-stl.com/acphotog/sporrs/ -> Message © 1998 SPORRS® - All Rights Reserved
