Did I Waste My Time?

Original image from the unedited RAW file (click to enlarge)
Olympus E-M1 Mark II, 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens @ 70mm; 1/30th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 320

Last weekend my wife and I attended a concert in Richmond, Virginia.  The entire weekend was nasty, weather-wise.  There was a lot of pouring rain, cold, windy.  It was not the kind of weather through which I wanted to drive, especially at night.  Instead of driving to Richmond, attending the concert, then driving back home the very late that night, we decided to stay overnight and make a little weekend trip out of it.  Late in the afternoon I found myself in a room on the 10th floor of a hotel in downtown Richmond overlooking the James River.

When looking out the window there was one thing in particular that intrigued me about my view.  It was the 118 year old Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Viaduct that moves trains along the banks of the James River around Richmond.  According to a 2014 Richmond Times-Herald newspaper article I found, construction on the trestle started in the 1890s and was completed in 1901.  It is about 3 miles long and is still used everyday.  I've never seen a train on that trestle in the hundreds of times I've been to Richmond, let alone photographed one crossing it.  I thought, with my 10th floor vantage point, irregardless of the weather, I would seize the opportunity to make some images if a train passed.

For those of you who have read my blog for a while understand that I've been a railroad enthusiast for most of my life.  I've always been fascinated with railroads and the important role they played in expanding this country during most of the 19th century.  They really were the backbone of growth for the U.S.  Growing up, my friends and I would hang around the local rail yard and the engineers would allow us to climb up in the locomotives and ride for a time.  We also used to "hop" trains and ride for a few miles before stepping off.  Hopping trains is not something I would recommend to anyone today, but it is what we regularly did when boys. Riding in engines and in cabooses, was a thrill.  

The sight of this trestle intrigued me as to whether or not I could get a decent photograph of a train, if one passed, despite the think glass through which would have to photograph, and bad weather.  In other words, would I be wasting my time?  I thought—a challenge!

On the way out of the house, I had grabbed my small Ape Case nylon bag and placed my Olympus E-M1 Mark II with the 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens attached in it.  I added an extra battery and a lens cleaning cloth and felt that was enough to handle anything I may encounter that I may want to photograph during this overnight trip.  I certainly had a camera that was capable of capturing a train passing.

Without success, I looked for a clean place on the hotel window glass through which to take a photo. Oh well. But, I did select a focal length and composed how I would want my image to look so I would be ready to capture a train if one appeared.  It never hurts to be ready.

I decided to position a chair near the hotel window so I was in a position to glance out and see if a train happened past.  I sat reading with my feet up on the edge of the desk and my ankles crossed.  Luckily, after about 3/4 of an hour, I glanced up and I saw a CSX train moving slowly across the trestle.  Here is where things get funny.

I spotted the train and jumped up out of the chair to grab my camera.  What I didn't realize was that my right leg, from the knee down, had completely gone numb from the position I had been sitting for so long.  As I stood up and grabbed my camera, I put my right foot on the floor and started to fall to my right.  I had absolutely no feeling in my lower leg and foot.  I reached for the window sill with my left hand as I had my camera in my right hand to try to stop my impending fall.  Trying to stop a fall to the right with a left hand wasn't working in my favor.  However, I did manage to keep from falling, but with no ability to feel my leg and foot, I could not maintain any sort of balance and fell backwards against the corner of the granite slab on the desk.  The granite slab had a very sharp corner and that corner got me right in the cheek.  Yep, that cheek!  Lol.  That part of my body had feeling and that corner hurt!  As I hit the desk, I started to fall to the right again and all the time trying to grab the window sill with my left hand, resisting trying to grab it with my right hand, which would have damaged my camera for sure, and not fall.  As this was going on, the train was going by!

After about 10 seconds, I managed to stabilize myself by leaning forward on my elbows, get the camera close enough to the window to try to eliminate the reflections in the glass of my shirt as well as the inside of the room so they wouldn't show up in my images.  I turned on my camera and shot a series of images as the train crossed the trestle.  I'm just glad the train was only moving 5 or 10 mph.  Otherwise, I would have missed it.

Was all this for naught?  Did I waste my time.  After all, I was shooting through a very thick, tinted, dirty window on a day in which the weather was awful.  You can be the judge.

The image at the top of this post is a RAW image right out of the camera and the one below is my finished image.

Did I think I wasted my time?  I don't think so.  I found and met a photographic challenge and I have a nice "record" shot of a train on a 118 year old trestle that is of historical significance to me.  After all, I do photograph  old and disappearing infrastructure that is reflective of times past.

The brick building in the lower right corner is part of the old Tredegar Iron Works, the main ordenance and
munitions manufacturing facility for the Confederate States during the American Civil War.  It is now a
National Park Service property.  (click to enlarge)

For those of you who, in the past, inquired as to how I edit my images, here is a brief rundown of my settings.

I left the profile on the default Adobe Color as a specific color palate was not really important for this image.  I just wanted it to look natural.

White Balance The camera had been set for Auto White Balance.  I found close to the "Daylight" setting to look batter than what was selected in-camera, even though it was not sunny.
Exposure +.83
Contrast 0.0
Highlights -55; once the exposure was increased I wanted to bring the sky down as it became the brightest thing in the image and was distracting
Shadows +44; the lower tones were just too dark and needed some boost
Whites/Blacks; 0.0
Clarity +26; I normally add clarity to almost all of my images.  In this case I wanted some additional mid-tone contrast applied across the entire image to bring out textures
Dehaze +31; at first I didn't use Dehaze but in order to make the background trees, which were light bluish, darker and bring down the sky even more, I added some Dehaze
Saturation +19; obviously the image needed a bit of a color boost for it to even look like it was shot in color.  But I didn't want it to look oversaturated.
HSL I boosted the luminance of the oranges and yellows to bring out the letters on the train and reduced the luminance of the blue to keep the background darker
Sharpening/Noise Reduction Amount 60, Detail 50, Masking 57; I added more import sharpening than I normally would.  I thought it needed it from the softening from shooting through the dirty, thick hotel room window.  
Noise Reduction was set at 10, just a little.
Cropping I straightened the horizon slightly (one of my obsessions!) and cropped to remove most of the bald sky and lower distractions.  I did want to keep the building on the lower right in tact as that building has historical significance.

Here is another of the series of images I made.  This one was converted to black and white in NIK Silver Efex 2.0
and heavily cropped.  For a M4/3 sensor, it has an extraordinary amount of detail! (click to enlarge)
I think Blogger slightly degrades images when posting them as I can see much more of the brick detail in the original.

There you have it.  A good historical record shot of something unusual for me.  I was able to compensate adequately for shooting through that thick, dirty window and I was able to adequately steady myself even with a numb leg and foot!  It all makes for a good memory.

Oh!  For the love of photography and trains!

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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