Nostalgia & History > Steam, night time, in COLOR!

This is “another one of those slides” that always seems to show up in a railfan collection from some unknown origin. All of us with RR image collections rooted in the 35mm slide format have one (or 6… or 12…etc). It’s a slide that may have picked up through trading, or maybe at some swap meet in the distant past. But the memory of it just isn’t there.

So goes the story behind this particular slide from Jim Watson’s collection. He has no clue when, where or how he acquired it. But the minute it came out of my scanner I knew I would be posting it here on TO. And I knew I have to put a little bit of that ol’ TLC into the photo-editing process. I had to deaden the almost washout glare coming off the roadway in lower left foreground. I managed to enhance the glow from the firebox without cutting into the silhouette effect of the engines against the Cheyenne night sky. All that aside, even without the editing this is a remarkable shot! And having taken 100s of night time extended exposures I can almost feel the ‘Brrr’ factor as this unknown photographer is hunkered down over his tripod…

1. C&S #646 sits doubleheading with C&S 803 in Cheyenne, WY on March 26, 1959.
Photographer unknown, EK copy slide from the James W. Watson collection

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels (santafe199)
Jim Watson (UP6900)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/23 00:50 by santafe199.

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An "A+" save and image both.
Bob

That is a dramatic photo with the firebox !
Good job on scanning and processing.
Gary 

gcm Wrote: > ... Good job on scanning and processing ...

Thanks. It was a challenge having to work with the soft focus. I'm in NO WAY knocking whoever the photographer was! The #1 hardest part about good night time/extended exposure photography is getting a sharp focus. And I'm guessing in 1959 split-image view finder focusing technology was still a few years in the future...

Lance/199