Black and Whites

This is the turbogenerator, as #90 is new enough to have an electrical system, at least for lighting, anyway.

Railroad photographers often like photographing the valve gear, in this case Walschaerts, if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm getting this wrong!!!).

Here's another one, as it started to move!!

Some days you just get lucky. The weather is perfect, the light is perfect, your camera performs flawlessly, you're in all the right places at the right times, and you have a phenomenal subject. Actually, Strasburg #90, while beautiful, isn't the most spectacular steam locomotive you could ever find. It's just a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0 from the 1920s that was designed for hauling freight on branchlines, but it's big and bulky enough to give the impression of massive, overwhelming force. On this particular day, I wasn't in Strasburg to take photographs, but to do documentary research, but I got very lucky coming out of the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum in that #90 was there exactly when I was, and it was a blazing hot summer day. You can see the brightness of the sun in the pictures, and although the originals are fine, the scans look more bleached. It's the only shame in displaying them here, as my old Omniscan came nowhere close to doing the photos justice.

I took this on the same day as the 6399 shot, scanned it in 1994, and uploaded it on Oct. 26, 2006, without a rescan!!! That's when I discovered the date on the 6399 shot was wrong. I've corrected it at least on the caption, although the photo remains wrong. In any case, I didn't used to like this photo so much, but looking at the other stuff on Flickr, this one holds up surprisingly well. It's not only, I think, a decent black and white scan, but a very old one. It's only a year newer than the original negative and print!!! I had an Omniscan black and white scanner then, and I haven't gotten around to rescanning this shot. It was originally color, shot with Kodacolor Gold 400, I think, but it's now, for obvious reasons, black and white, and it might be a better shot because of it. It was my first truly successful pan shot, so it's significant to me for that reason, too.

This was taken minutes after my "arriving in" shot, which has gotten so much attention. I've been praised for the puddle reflection on this shot, but I'm posting this mainly because it goes with the other one.

This photo is a little bit grainy, which is a result of a high-contrast print being fed into a primitive scanner. I apologize in advance for that, but I posted it anyway because I love the composition. Maybe in the future I'll post a rescanned one, but for now this will have to do.

Here's yet another shot of Amsterdam Centraal. I loved that trainshed, and I figured I had to shoot it in black and white. This is a closer view than Picture 1. In spite of the copyright date, I shot this in December 1998.

Here's another one of my black and whites of Amsterdam Centraal. I loved that trainshed, and I figured I had to shoot it in black and white. In spite of the copyright date, I shot this in December 1998.

I've always liked this photo, even if many serious photographers haven't. They say it's "boring," but most of them aren't railfans! From the technical point of view, the contrast is a bit low, but since it was a gloomy Plattsburgh winter day, if I were to up the contrast on this, the detail and the grit of the scene would be lost. For the railfans, though, it's a nice shot of an F40PH in the last years of F40 haulage on Train #68, the "Adirondack."

Actually, this is just Picture 1 converted to black and white. I wanted to try both.

When I took this, Amtrak ran a seperate Sunday schedule for trains #68 and 69, the "Adirondack" service from NYP-Montreal, with the Sunday Adirondack getting numbers 70 and 71. I've always liked this shot, even if many "serious" photographers haven't. It is a bit abstract, as you can't see the features of the train, so it's more an emotional than a "tech" shot. I hope you like it. :-)

This is part of the same series as Strasburg #90, Picture 3 (go figure :-)). This one, though, may have the most well-rounded artistic merit of the series, as it has abstraction, the best contrast, the best detail, and so on.

This is a photo that I took of Strasburg #90, a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0, during the summer of 1997. It was one of a series that I still regard among my best black and white photos ever taken of a steam locomotive. This is my favorite one because it shows off the details the best of the series, in my opinion, and it is a little bit more abstract than the others, even if it's still clearly a steam locomotive smokebox. I used a Nikon N6006 with a Nikkor 35-50 zoom and Kodak Tri-X 400 film. I had just learned to shoot proper black and white in the semester or two before I shot this, and this was my first real success with black and white rail photography, so that also adds to the significance of this. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get around to posting the others.

This is one of my favorite rail photographs of all time. I love the way the light outlines the boiler, as well as the crisp detail of the illuminated areas, and the contrast is also near-perfect, even if the ground detail is somewhat limited. On many of my prints of this shot, I've burned the ground in, of course, and it looks like I did the same with this one.

The Delphi Theatre in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin was once a centre of Berlin's cabaret scene, particularly before World War II and particularly for the gay cabaret scene, according to the tour guide who was showing me around. It was one of the only buildings in the area to survive the war.

I took this on Fasanenstrasse, as the street sign gives away, but I've completely forgotten the significance of this building. Does anybody know what it is?

This building is one of the stranger looking ones in Berlin, although the main reason is the "sail" on the roof rather than the rest of the building. There were rumours when I was in town that the sail was due to be taken down soon, but I don't know if this has come to pass.