Western Railroad Discussion > Sunday Morning on Cajon Pass

Hi y'all!

Last Sunday morning was absolutely beautiful on Cajon Pass. I though I'd share a couple photos with you. A storm blew through overnight, which all but ruined an attempt to bag some moonlight photos. However the morning dawned with an incredible display of clear air and tremendous wave clouds over the San Gabriel Mountains. Then the trains started coming, and coming, and coming . . . I rate this as by far one of my best Cajon experiences ever.

Enjoy

- Kit -

first photo: Amtrak Southwest Chief descends through Cajon Bowl at 7:15 AM.

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Here's the power from a JBHunt stack train passing what I've allways refered to as the "Chow Road", since it leads up the hill to Summit Inn and breakfast . . . (I forget what name it has on the map).

K

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Unfortunately, the moon was almost completely obscured by clouds when I took this, which meant no nice blue sky full of star trails. The exposure was a complete guess at 20 minutes at f/2 with 800 speed film, however in that time UP obliged by sending two stack trains through the scene.

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I have been looking at the dirt road on the side of the mountain west of Blue Cut for several years, and finally tried it in the dark on Saturday night (it took some doing to find it). Pretty cool view! This was taken just before it really started to cloud up at about 9PM, so the exposure was a more reasonable 7 minutes at f/4 with the 800 speed film. I made this into a Black and White from the color print when I scanned it.

K

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Here we are at the Lone Pine Canyon Road crossing of the BNSF main at Cozy Dell. I have to admit that this is actually something of a cliche, but it was fun doing it anyway. This was before the moon started hiding behind the clouds, so the exposure was a proper 3 minutes and 40 seconds at f/8 with a 45 mm lense. Two cars were waiting for the crossing to clear, and I opened the shutter just as the gates started to rise. Next time I'd use a slightly smaller lense aperture to cut down the glare from the lights a little bit relative to the overall ambient light.

That's it for now.

(and for my A.H.S.O. friends, this is just to show you that I do actually do more than just chase trains on the Harbor Sub like a dog that is addicted to chasing cars!)

Enjoy!

Kit Courter

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Great shots as usual Kit, do you use a hand held light meter for the night exposures or just guestimate?

JJ

That first shot was one of the best I have ever scene of Amtrak at Cajon. You should submit it to Amtrak for their next brochure. Maybe they would pay for the film. That is... if they are still around to make another brochure.

Great work
Bryan

Nice work. The last one looks like Swarthout Canyon Road (AKA Campground Crossing) at Blue Cut about MP 64.4.

Regarding the night shots - I have a pretty complicated method for figuring out what exposures to use at night. When conditions are right, it works exactly every time. However when the moon plays hide-and-seek with the clouds (as happened on Saturday night), it becomes pure guesswork. I have recently added to my bag of tricks by metering the brightness of the moon with a one-degree spot meter, which gives me an incident light reading that I am trying to figure out how to correlate to exposure (add lots and lots of reciprocity failure correction!). I did that this past weekend, and managed to get usable, though consistently overexposed, images. It should get better as I work on the method, though.

Unfortunately, no one makes an affordable low-light exposure meter - understandable as there really isn't much demand for it. I used to use a Gossen Luna Pro that I borrowed from a friend, which read down to EV -2 (and thus was useful for VERY BRIGHT full moon situations, as that is about how bright a scene you get with the very brightest moons. The most recent full moon read at EV -1.94 and was the brightest I'd seen in a while). For comparison purposes, broad daylight is about EV 13, and EV 10 translates to a reflected light level of 10 candles per square foot. I know this all sounds complex, and it is, however one has to be that way to ensure consistently good results. Most cameras do all the calculations internally (that's what the internal light meters do).

Kit

<The last one looks like Swarthout Canyon Road (AKA Campground Crossing) at Blue Cut about MP 64.4.
>

Yes, that is the name of the road. I forgot that Lone Pine Canyon Road heads out of its namesake canyon and intersects SR138 near Morman Rocks. Back ten years ago I used to frequent Cajon a lot, and really knew the ground. The trip last weekend was my second this year, and my third in the last 6 years - I'm afraid the grey cells aren't up to their past performance.

K