OK, for those of you who know me, I'm not talking about resolving to go to the gym more often, eat healthier food, read more books, etc, (and those are not bad things), but what do you want to resolve to do in '22 on the railfanning front? I'll start. I want to stop being lazy, and get out of bed earlier to bag shots at blue hour and first light golden hour. The best shooting of the day is this roughly 2 hours of pre-dawn, sunrise, sunset and post-sunset light. I need to stop sleeping in and get more sunrise shots. I also want to try new shooting styles--panning, zoom-pan, tight closeups of moving equipment as abstract art, etc. I recently joined a railfan photo group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/steelwheels.photography), and the admins sometimes do challenges. No locomotives, weather, people, etc, to push folks outside of their cozy little box that is their style, and try something new. The group also has some very talented photographers that share their work. It inspires me to be better and try new things. For the first shot of 2022, I offer this subzero view of CP train 499, the westbound St Paul-Calgary manifest. Had I planned ahead, I would have noticed the tracks and the sun were at the same position, viewed from the RR Museum of Minot. I took a few shots of the swirling snow and glinty sunrise light, too.
Sepp, I get that for sure. If not for EXIF data, I'd have no recollection of when. The train data, and location is hard enough to remember! Got recommendations for how to improve notes?
I'll let you know when I figure it out. I got off to a great start today, had a pen but no paper! It turned out there was no traffic today while I was out.
That sounds like my Wednesday Sepp! My goal is simply just to try and get trackside more than I have the past few years (which has been very little). Dreary weather but managed to get out for a few minutes today and got one train and a lot of freight cars like this one. (Cartersville GA 01-02-2022)
When I get home from a railfan outing, I download all of the pictures from my camera to my PC. I then cull through them to find the best and I delete the others. I then edit the keepers and name the files in a YYYY-MM-DD Number SequenceNumber City ST format, such as 2021-01-02 001 Asheville NC.jpg If I have only one shot from the location that day, I dispense with the Sequence Number. With this, I can easily search for any year, city or state. For shots of locomotives or rolling stock, I may add BOXCAR CR 123456 as a suffix. And I might add the train number and other details to the EXIF data. I then file the edited photos in a folder and retain the unedited keepers too. My photo editing skills have improved and the unedited files are best for a clean start. Deleting the poor shots assures I won't needlessly face the impossible task of someday dealing with TBs of lousy shots. I'm sure other photographers have better systems, but this works well for me. PS: I'm SO glad that I labeled and kept my many 35mm slides organized over the years!
