Steam & Excursion > Question

I was watching the departure of today's train from Chama when I noticed these 2 people standing on the elevated track and wondered what gives with the white towel, sheet, etc that they had over their heads.

Sharon Evans
Glen Allen, VA

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Cinder Guards my friend. Towels from the motel I would guess...

Cheers, Dave

Thanks, but I did not notice a lot of problems with cinders when I was walking around the yard or riding the train.

Sharon Evans
Glen Allen, VA

Looks like they both have tripods, maybe just shading the viewfinders. BTW, I have an old leather jacket from my last trip out of Chama with cinder holes burned into it everywhere,(even cinders in the pockets!), but I did spend most of the trip in the open car right behind the locomotive.

Cheers, Dave

If either of them are using a view camera, those things are focusing cloths, black on one side and white on the other.

Talked to them this morning. Covers are for better viewing of lcd screen on cameras. They are taking still phots.

Ed

Yes, the old LCD viewing problem in sunlight. That was what I thought. Do we have any better technology out there for viewing a digital camera screen in sunlight other than using the viewfinder (which I presume not all digital cameras have?).

Some do, some don't. My good camera has a viewfinder (which is actually a monitor and not direct optical, but that is a little unusual, I believe). My cheap P&S only has the back panel. With my old eyes I can't pull focus from distant to near without changing my glasses, so the back panel is pretty useless if I'm in a hurry. The viewfinder has the usual diopter correction, so I can compensate for my lousy focal range.

What's the future? I suspect for a lot of non-professionals it will be an iPhone. It does everything, why would you carry a clunky camera around any more than you would wear a wristwatch anywhere but a Retro party? (And frankly it looks like iPhone photography is capable of serious use, from stuff posted around here.) For a lot of professionals it will probably be iPhone too, at least on some occasions. I'll go out on a limb and predict that the iPhone will be the ENG news-gathering device of the future; handy-cams and camcorders will vanish.

Another possibility, at least for people that can focus their eyes, will be something like Google Glass. Just wifi it to the camera and have it show a standard viewfinder image from your camera. Use the compass, gyro and G sensors on the glasses to have the camera point where you are looking. Squint to run the zoom, blink to take a shot.

For anyone who believes that you can't take a decent picture without a $5000 camera, I submit exhibit A, taken at 35,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico through an airplane window...unbelieveable! This is an iPhone 5s shot.

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