Is It Winter Yet? How About A Winter Photo To Cool Your Bones! Also, My Winter Project This Year

I believe I made this image in February, 1998 using a Leica Minilux 35mm point-and-shoot camera at the
abandoned CSX Lee Hall Station in Newport News, Virginia. From a negative scan. The station, now
with a historical designation, was moved to the other side of the tracks and rehabilitated. Take a
 look at the image at the bottom of this post to see how it looks now. (click to enlarge)

What I remember most about making this photo is that a) I was cold, b) I wasn’t wearing boots and my feet were really cold as I was standing in four or five inches of freshly fallen snow, c) I was way too close to the train which was traveling about 70mph, and d), as it roared by my camera and I became completely covered with snow!  But I made my shot!

The scan of this negative is subpar but I still have the negative somewhere and plan to re-digitize it.  

This year’s winter project is to drag out all of my thousands of 120 and 35mm negatives and digitize many (most? all?) of them.  The 120 negatives, both black & white and color, are mostly my personal work consisting of landscapes, nature, railroading and ‘fine art,’ whatever I thought that was at the time while the vast majority of the 35mm negatives are of my family, family vacations, events, etc.  I think to be successful with this project I need to develop a strategy to keep from feeling overwhelmed by the volume of negatives I have.  I’m thinking about adopting a strategy of setting several smaller goals of only digitizing one large plastic container of negatives at a time.  Once I complete that container, I’ll go to the next and set the next smaller goal.  I may be able to fool myself into thinking I can get them done over the winter months.  Hopefully.

I've already purchased a digitizing system which will allow me to create pretty high quality copies using one of my digital cameras.  If you are a long time reader of this blog, you might remember that I copied thousands of my 35mm slides a few years ago (June/July, 2019).  I used a makeshift setup for that but now I’m going to use a properly engineered system with a better light source.  If you are interested in reading a comprehensive description of what my setup was and how I digitized those slides as well as outcomes, you can find my posts on digitizing slides with a Nikon Z7 digital camera here, here, here, here and here.  (Comment:  I think 46mp is far too many to accomplish excellent digital files)   If you are interested in my methodology for this round of digitizing, come back to the blog as I will post my setup, gear I use, settings, issues encountered, etc.  Also, I plan on posting many of the old scanned negative images in the future, potentially daily.  If I decide to post daily, I would create a sister blog and do it there.

As the station looks now photographed from the opposite direction.

Lee Hall station looking west from earlier this year.  The group who rehabilitated the station did
a really nice job.  The future plan is to move an old retired steam locomotive, the C&O #2756,
to the tracks just in front of the caboose.  The old locomotive now sits across from the the Newport
News Amtrak station. (click to enlarge)

Lesson learned:  Don’t be an idiot when going out to photograph in the winter!  Lol.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  Dennis A. Mook  All content on this blog is © 2013-2023 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.