Western Railroad Discussion > A coal train in the Gorge

Coal trains can often be so uniform along their length as to be boring. However the power set on this one, and the scene in which it was captured, certainly kept it from being the usual boring coal train.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving, all!

- Kit

Kit Courter
Menefee, CA
LunarLight Photography

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Great shot . . . and Happy TD to you too!

CimaScrambler Wrote:
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> Coal trains can often be so uniform along their
> length as to be boring. However the power set on
> this one, and the scene in which it was captured,
> certainly kept it from being the usual boring coal
> train.

When I see CimaScrambler as the poster and the word Gorge in the subject .... I KNOW the photos are going to be well-worth looking at!
Thank you!

Will MacKenzie
Dundas, ON

thehighwayman Wrote:
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> When I see CimaScrambler as the poster and the
> word Gorge in the subject .... I KNOW the photos
> are going to be well-worth looking at!
> Thank you!

YES, I agree! Very nice, Kit.

I don't think it's possible to take a "boring" photo at a spot like that! Beautiful!
Bob

Thanks for the generous words.

A little technical info: The shadows in the RAW file of this image are very dark. I managed to make it look more like my eye saw it that day by using a "pseudo-HDR" technique, wherein you make three TIF extractions from the RAW file in Photoshop: one 2.5 stops brighter than normal, one normal, one 2.5 stops darker than normal. These are then combined ("tone mapped") in High Dynamic Range software (Photomatix Pro, in this case), with a very low "HDR strength" applied to avoid the surrealistic HDR effects one can get from pushing the HDR thing too hard. It took awhile playing around with the software to figure out how to do this. The image was then taken back into Photoshop for the usual local burning, color and sharpening adjustments. I still have a lot to learn about the HDR software, but so far so good. Trying to get the shadows right in Photoshop Elements alone just wasn't working, so I tried this other route after reading about it on the photo.net technical forums. If you want to learn how to do advanced image management, the technical forums at photo.net have a lot to offer.

- Kit

Kit Courter
Menefee, CA
LunarLight Photography



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/12 08:58 by CimaScrambler.

NIIIICE pic!!!!!!