# 202 – High Dynamic Range Photography – A Substitute For Creativity?

Astley Green Colliery

Several years ago, I experimented with using Photomatix to produce High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. I reasoned that as a lot of the urbex pictures I was taking were in low light, then this would be the ideal tool to capture the full range of visual information, or something like that. However, I grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of control in the tone mapping part of the process, inasmuch as it makes global adjustments and you end up with a weird looking image. So I ended up spending as much time again in Photoshop making local adjustments to get the image looking how I wanted it to, plus there was all the artifacts, halos and jagged edges it created. In the end I got fed up with it, and when I changed my main camera from a Nikon D70 to a D700, which has a sensor with an improved dynamic range, I gave up Photomatix as I found that there was sufficient detail in the highlights and shadows to make local adjustments in Photoshop. I also found myself using a tripod less and less (essential for the exposure bracketing required to create the 3 or more images needed for HDR) as I can handhold the D700 in light where a tripod was required for the D70.

Prestolite Factory, Leyland

In looking at other people’s HDR images, I grew increasingly dismayed at the revolting mess the majority of people make of it. To my mind, people are using it as a substitute for creativity. Take a load of images, bung them into Photomatix, and then move the sliders up and down until you get something garish. Bingo. It’s the lazy way of image manipulation.

I then heard an interview with Trey Ratcliff on the PhotoNetCast podcast. Trey runs the stuckincustoms.com website and is a devotee of HDR, so much so that stuckincustoms is not just a nice looking website, it’s a business that employs 11 people. So I reckoned that it had to be worth checking out, and I was impressed with what I saw. To my eyes, this is how HDR should be done. OK, I don’t like all the stuff, some of it is still a bit too garish for my eyes, but light years from the majority of HDR images posted on flickr and forums. In the interview, Trey voiced some of my frustrations about the HDR workflow involving going back into Photoshop to finish off the image, and he reckoned that 80% of the time was spent in Photomatix and 20% in Photoshop.

Here’s my take on it – HDR has been described as a ‘world without shadows’, and my photography relies heavily on the shadows. I don’t always want every single detail in the shadows, and when I do, I prefer to keep my entire workflow in Photoshop. I’ve found that I prefer to use select areas of the image on individual layers that are individually adjustable to get the balance I want, rather than making global adjustments to the image then going into Photoshop to make local adjustments. I suspect that because I’ve spent time in wet darkrooms and hours in photoshop I can look at an image and see how I want the image to look, and know how to get it looking like I want to look, rather than rely on computer algorithms to make global adjustments without actually ‘seeing’ or understanding the image.

Will I be going back to Photomatix? I don’t think so. I think HDR and tonemapping is a useful tool in certain situations where you’ve got massive contrast and /or not much light, as it will provide an image that is a useful starting point for further processing. In other words, it should be used as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself!

# 201 – before and after – articulating your vision photographically

“It is impossible for a photographic print to duplicate the range of brightnesses (luminances) of most subjects, and thus photographs are to some degree interpretations of the original subject values. Much of the creativity of photography lies in the infinite range of choices open to the photographer between attempting a nearly literal representation of the subject and freely interpreting it in highly subjective ‘departures from reality’ My work for example is frequently regarded is ‘realistic’, while in fact the value relationships within most of my photographs are far from a literal transcription of actuality. I employ numerous photographic controls to create an image that represents ‘the equivalent of what I saw and felt’ (to paraphrase a statement I heard on a number of occasions from Alfred Stieglitz – the great photographer of the early twentieth century). If I succeed, the viewer accepts the image as its own fact, and responds emotionally and aesthetically to it. It is safe to assume that no two individuals see the world about them in the same way.”

Ansel Adams, The Negative

Ansel Adam’s trilogy of books The Camera, The Negative and The Print are now decades old but while the darkroom techniques are now largely irrelevant to anyone using digital, the principles behind the creation of creative black and white images remain true.

For Ansel, the negative was just the starting point. In his book ‘The Print’ he describes how he printed his famous ‘Clearing Winter Storm’;

“During the main printing exposure of 10 second,, I hold back the shadowed cliff area near the right edge for 2 seconds, and the two trees in the right hand corner for 2 seconds…..After the basic exposure, I burn the bottom edge for 1 second and the lower left corner for 3 seconds. I then burn the left edge of the print for 2 seconds and the right edge for 2 seconds, in each case tilting the card to favour the sky.

Burning is required from the base of the sun lit forest areas, near the waterfall, to the top of the image, with three up and down passages of 3 seconds each. I then burn the sky along the top for 10 seconds, continuing with the 2 and 4 seconds at the upper left corner. Then using a hole 1 inch wide, I burn the central area (between the two cliffs and the clouds above) for 10 seconds, and then bring the hole closer and burn the smaller area of cloud for an additional 10 seconds.”

Phew!!! a testament not only to his vision (and being in the right place at the right time), but also his ability to translate that vision, using his knowledge of exposure, film, paper and developer properties and of course his printing expertise.

But the parallels are starting to become clear with the digital darkroom. Where before there was a negative, there is now a raw (or possibly a jpeg) file, while the variables of development and printing are practically eliminated.

The images of The Duke Of Lancaster that I’m using are ones I’ve used several times before in this blog, and I’ve even gone into my thought processes, but here I want to explore them a bit deeper, more the why than the how.

I started with some research – the internet is a godsend for this kind of thing! I looked at the location on Google Earth to get an idea of the topography, as well as look at loads of photos on flickr and Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/SJ1779. Photos on Geograph are rubbish from a creative perspective, but do give a good idea of the surroundings, whereas the flickr ones are more variable. While good from an inspiration perspective, none of them really moved me, although some of the night photographs are superb! However, on this occasion, night photography wasn’t what I was doing. While it would have been nice to have chosen the optimum time of day, light and weather conditions, I didn’t have that luxury as I don’t exactly live on the doorstep, neither do I have unlimited opportunities to go out and photograph.

So what did I have in mind? I wanted to interpret the scene as I felt it. How do you ‘feel’ a visual scene that you have no emotional attachment to? To me a scene is not just the sum of the elements you see before you, that’s just composition. So what did I see and feel? I saw a sad scene before me, a proud old liner slowly rotting away in a forgotten old dock. The paint was rusting, the flags weren’t flying and the happy travellers had been replaced with the occasional urban explorer. It’s future is uncertain, but whatever happens the old ship isn’t likely to be sailing very far, or to a happy ending.I felt quite sad that this graceful old liner was marooned here so I wanted to portray something dark and dramatic, that had a sense of place. This brings me to the coastal landscape – I’ve always found estuaries a bit weird. There’s something about places where the land fades into the sea that is slightly surreal. Maybe it’s because they’re the only landscape that is constantly changing, or the lack of people and buildings, I don’t know.

Creative choices started at the location – lens choice (16-35 to get foreground, 28-70 to get the wider scene) composition (placement of the ship in the frame, how much sky to include, how much foreground) and exposure (underexposed to capture some detail in the sky). I then took 30 or so different images of slightly different compositions to give myself plenty of choice later on.

When I got back, I uploaded them to Lightroom and viewed them all sequentially in a slide show, ranking them 1-5 as I went on, and then just viewed the ones with 4 and 5 stars. I then switched the computer off and left them for a few days and came back to take another look. It’s surprising how you see things differently once you come back later. I then made my final selections, based on what ‘looked right’.

As someone far wiser than I once said, every image contains a hundred others. I now had my starting point, but I now wanted to transform it into something which communicated what I had in my head. As the image was a raw file, it all looked a bit dreary and flat, so I had to start the processing in Lightroom. I had in my head a high contrast black and white with a dramatic sky, so I needed to recover some detail in the sky first of all. Thankfully, I’d underexposed so there were no burnt out highlights.

This left a muddy looking image, but you can only do global adjustments in Lightroom, so I had to move to Photoshop to start the buggering about with layers and making local adjustments to curves, sharpening, etc.

Once in Photoshop, I converted to black and white using Nik Silver Efex. There are loads of ways of converting in Photoshop, none of which I can be bothered with as I foind the Nik plug in both easier to use and provides a better result. In Photoshop proper, I made separate selections for the sky, foreground and ship, which are the three key compositional elements. The sky was adjusted using curves, as was the foreground. I also created a duplicate layer of the foreground and changed it’s layer type to multiply to give it the contrast I was looking for. I also adjusted the brightness of the ship slightly to make it stand out against the dark backgrounds, as well as giving it some extra sharpening.

Result: well if you read this blog regularly, you’ll have seen it before, but I’m most pleased with it, and recently got it put on a 30 x 20 canvas by Vista Digital in Longridge near Preston, who I can highly recommend, as inkjet printing of monochrome images is difficult and they did a superb job of it! My own print of it also came second in the Brownedge Arts Festival Photographic Competition, the prize money more than off setting the cost of the canvas!

So what are the lessons I learnt from this?

1) Think about how the scene in front of you moves you.

2) Think ahead when choosing your exposure.

3) Where possible, do some research in advance. Some photographers prefer not to view other images of the scene as they want the photograph to be theirs, not influenced by someone else. I can understand this point of view, but you’re missing out on potentially some great ideas for compositions. You don’t have to copy, the creative choices will always be your own!

#176 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill – DoF Tomfoolery

With the trespassing element of the visit complete, I thought I’d indulge in a bit of creative arty-fartyness.

Nikon D700, 28-70mm, 1/1600 @F2.8

Here’s another one but with a bit more depth of field. The mill is still soft, but a bit more distinct. Not sure which one I prefer.

#166 – pre-visualising an image

In the words of one of my personal heroes, don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? I’d been planning to go and have a look at the Duke Of Lancaster for ages as I had an image in my mind. And it was exactly like the one at the top of the post that you’ve just seen. It’s very rare that I do this, as more often than not when I’m out exploring or taking railway photographs, I tend to be spontaneous and react to what I see. However, I’d spent quite a bit of time beforehand looking at photos of the ship on Flickr, so compositions were forming in my head. However, the finished image needed to be high contrast with an ominous sky, as is my style.

Meanwhile, back on the beach, I took lots of different photos from different perspectives, at different distances and with different focal lengths. I don’t normally machine gun a subject, but I wanted to give myself plenty of options when I was selecting an image for processing.

My black and white workflow involves Nik Silver Efex to convert to monochrome, and in this I also use the ‘Wet Rocks’ Effect, and add a Tri-X filter to up the contrast. But any effects added in this are applied to the whole image (I can’t get on with the control points in Silver Efex), so In Photoshop, I selected the sky and tinkered with the levels then changed the blending mode to ‘Multiply’, then did the same with the foreground, albeit changing the blending mode to ‘Color Dodge’. There’s no rationale behind the blending mode choices, they just looked good. I then selected the ship and tweaked the contrast slightly as by now it was looking a bit flat in comparison.

The net result was this, something which exactly matched the image in my head. It’s something I’ve never managed to pull off before, and probably won’t ever do again due to the somewhat dynamic way in which I photograph, but it’s good to get an insight into how proper landscape photographers work.

#165 – Square Format

While I’ve never shot a square format camera, I’ve found myself on a number of occasions recently, cropping to a square format. While of course this is retrospective re-composition, as opposed to deliberate in-camera composition, the square format is an interesting one that for some reason is difficult to use. Maybe it’s to do with unfamiliarity, as we are so used to seeing rectangular images, or maybe it’s an unnatural composition, as our field of view is not square.

While it’s difficult to compose square on an SLR (unless you’ve got a decent live view option), it is easier on a compact camera by cutting a square template out of card and attaching it to the screen on the back of the camera. Of course the images will still be recorded square on the sensor and so will have to be cropped in the computer, but it’s a good starting point.

So what should we consider when composing square? David Prakel (Composition, AVA Publishing, 2006) writes:

Square images are symmetrical about both the horizontal and vertical axes, which lends solidity and stability. The resulting quarters are also squares, and the whole form is strongly directed around the centre, which can lack dynamism. The diagonals however, can be used to dramatic compositional effect.

Having parts of the subject radically break through the square frame can add dynamism. Intentional compositional imbalances between contrasting areas, jagged lines, and edges that extend beyond the visible frame can unsettle the square format and be used to great creative effect.

While not truly symmetrical, I chose to crop this square as the reflection does give an element of symmetry, while the diaganols add a sense of dynamism that can be absent from a square due to it’s inherently solid, static shape.The other key reason was that there was too much in the frame simply not adding anything – empty sky and puddle. The fact that I used a 28mm lens may have been a disadvantage in this instance as it simply gave me too much I didn’t want in the frame.  As discussed before on this blog, a good rule of thumb for cropping is to look at what you are thinking of removing and thinking about whether it is adding anything to the image.

#143 – A Photo From Hans Steeneken

A great thing about having websites (and the internet in general now I think about it), is how information and people have become more accessible. I wrote a blog article a few months back on Hans Steenekens All Trains To Stop, and a few weeks late, Hans contacted me via my blog, and we have exchanged a few emails since (in fact Ian Krause also contacted me after I wrote about him also).

Hans recently sent me this photo that he has kindly allowed me to put up on here. He writes that “For panning shots you need a bit of luck. I never tried it on a single train but usually on four or five and selected the best later on. If I remember well, I used a rangefinder camera (my Leica) because it gave extra space in the viewer, i.e. outside the actual frame. The rectangular focusing aid in the centre of the finder was very helpful to aim and synchronize with the cab as it sped by, because that had to be the middle of the frame. I used a 35 mm lens. A shutter speed of 1/30 sec gave a nice blur. With longer lenses a faster speed worked better. On electrics or diesels it wouldn’t work at all because apart from the blurred countryside there wasn’t much to blur on the loco itself.”

The engine is a 01.5, the DR rebuilt 01 4-6-2. I’ve long been fascinated by the big European steam loco’s as they are just so different to British steam. Having said that , I was interested to read in the current Heritage Railway that Beyer Peacock supplied some engines to Turkey in 1948 that were remarkably similar to the DR Class 50′s.

#138 – Two Views

Despite sending in photos to the railway mags, I’ve never had any published. I presume it’s because they’re either too alternative (possible) or not good enough (probably more likely!). I’m not losing sleep over it, I don’t photograph with the intention of publication, I do it as I enjoy the challenge of doing something different.

A point in case is these two pictures, the one above I much prefer to the one below. Try as I might, I could not  satisfactorily get rid of the damned colour cast, so I gave up and decided to enjoy the unusual lighting instead.

The one below is of the same engine, but from the traditional head height / front three-quarter perspective. OK, I’ve tried to include what I could of the shed, but the it’s still a bit too much of a record shot. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn’t move me, doesn’t make me think. It works well as part of a set, but is nothing special as a stand-alone image.

#137 – how to create a Blurb photobook

Over the past couple of years, I’ve created a few photobooks using Blurb and have always been very happy with the service and the product. In addition, their Booksmart software has got better especially with the ability to customise the templates or even design your own. This has opened up a huge range of creative options for your page layouts, although it was possible to do this before if you wanted to design your book in photoshop and import the pages in as jpeg pictures.

Blurb have produced a book on book design which is available on their website ‘How To Make A Gorgeous Photo Book’, which is worth buying if you’re serious about designing your book. It won’t turn you into a book designer, but it will give you some good tips. It’s also worth looking at some of the books produced by other people that are for sale in the Blurb bookstore, and also at books in your own collection or in high street book shops.

What follows below isn’t a guide to using Blurb’s Booksmart software – I recommend the Blurb Forums on their website for that. What it is, is some ideas I’ve picked up, on planning and designing books while creating Mechanical Landscapes, my latest book.

Topic / Theme / Purpose     

For me, this was easy as I was looking to put together a retrospective of my best Urban / Industrial Exploration photos. The book was for me as I was planning an indefinite break from this type of photography, so I wanted to put something together as a ’best of’. However, I’d decided that I would make the book available for sale on Blurb via my website in case anyone wished to buy a copy. Making money was not the goal - my plan was to sell tham at cost.

A previous book I’d done was a college portfolio and for that, a statement of intent was required and this is a good thing to do as it puts the book into context, indeed most published books have some form of introduction. If creating a book for your own enjoyment, this probably isn’t necessary, but it can provide a useful reference point for keeping the book on track, especially when it comes to selection of photographs.

You’ll also want a title – I chose Mechanical Landscapes as it sets the tone for the collection of photos in the book. However, for my annual photo album books, I just use the year 2008, 2009, etc.

Book Format    

This is pretty much the first thing you choose when creating a book in Blurb’s Booksmart software. I’d been toying with different layouts for weeks, before I decided on 8 x 10 portrait. The reason I decided on that was because I take a lot of photos in portrait format, and I always think that they look lost on a landscape format page. In addition, landscape format photos can be done across two pages so you’re making the most of the space available (providing you don’t mind a spine running down the middle of your pictures).

Photo Selection    

This wasn’t too much of an issue to me as I kind of had a long short-list in my head of images. I use Lightroom as my cataloguing software, so this made accessing and viewing the images quite straightforward, and I simply added them all to a collection so that I could keep track of them. I know that you can do the same in Adobe Bridge, and I think Aperture has the same functionality. As I’ve got plenty of hard drive space, I simply exported all the images in the collection to a separate folder which made importing them into Booksmart easier than messing around looking for individual images in individual folders. It’s easy enough then to just delete the folder of exported images once you’ve finished the project and keep the originals intact.

In terms of image selection criteria, well that depends on the individual, and on the goal of the book. I not only had my very best images in the book but also ones that kept on the theme of the book.

Page Layout    

I predominantly used the existing templates in Booksmart, but took advantage of the ability to edit the layouts when required. This was particularly useful on the portrait format pages, as the text box is contained within the photograph frame, and sometimes I needed to move the text box as it was covering something significant in the photo, or it was impossible to read the text due to the colour behind. It’s worth mentioning that as the images are black and white, I’ve chosen to use predominantly white text, with some black text where white would’ve been rendered invisible by the background behind.    

As mentioned above, I put the landscape photos across two pages – to do this, drag and drop the photo onto one page, then go back to the panel of images and drag it again onto the other (or do it once, then right click it, copy it, then paste it onto the other).

 

Lining the two sides of the picture up can be a pain – some people create one large photo in Photoshop, then cut it in half and import the two halves into Booksmart. That’s a good idea, but I’ve never done it simply due to the time involved in Photoshop beforehand. I simply line them up by eye using elements of the photo as reference points. I work on the basis that the very centres of the pages will be in the spine anyway, so any tiny misalignment isn’t going to be noticed unless someone is looking VERY hard.

Order Of Photos

OK, so you’ve started dropping the photos in and it’s starting to look like a book! For my annual photo albums, I just put them in chronological order, but for Mechanical Landscapes, my alternatives were to either put them in by location, or by industry (sure I could have just put them in randomly, but I much prefer structure). I chose in the end to go by industry – Steel, Mining, Paper, Textiles, etc.

Once in the chapters, the photos again needed ordering so as to get a flow. For the portrait images which faced each other across a spread, I tried to put images together that were either similar subjects, similar compositions, similar tones, or just looked right together!

The final thing to consider was theire order within the chapter, and trying to get some kind of order or flow to them. Within the chapter, I tended to group them by location, but in general, the aim was to have a strong image at the start, middle and end of each chapter.

Photo Selection    

Whittling the photos down was one of the hardest jobs, and it was something that I had to come back to time and time again. Over time, the ones that are unmovable really stand out from the weaker ones. The need here is to filter out not just the weaker images, but also on the basis of how they work as a cohesive collection. e.g. are they on topic, not just for the book but also the chapter?

A useful feature of Booksmart is the ability to lock all the pages together. This makes it easy to delete pages and move them around quickly as they are bound together in 2 page spreads.

My limiting factor was that I’d decided that the book would be a maximum of 160 pages long as the Blurb pricing structure goes up in 40 page increments, and as I’d decided that the book was going to be for sale, £21 was probably the maximum I’d stand any chance of selling the book for. As it was, that number of pages was probably the optimum number for the amount of photographs of the required standard.

It’s good to get a second opinion here, but one of the weaknesses of the Booksmart software is that you can’t publish to PDF, so you can only show people the book on the computer you’ve created it on. My solution to this was realising that I had Microsoft Publisher in Office (that will publish to PDF), and I created a parallel book in here to email. This took a couple of evenings, but was worth doing, as it allowed me to print a copy of the book out as well, and there’s nothing like seeing it all on paper.

Cover Design    

Don’t judge a book by it’s cover is the expression, and that just goes to show how much of an impact a book cover has. It’s something I’ve struggled with in the past, and there is indeed a knack to getting it right. Having no graphic design training, I decided to have a look at what seemed to work on other books that I liked. Here’s my tips:

A good font

The basic ones installed on your computer are a good start, but really, you need to be looking at the fonts available online to download. I chose one called Heroin 07, as it is a grungy looking one and fitted in well with my photographs. (Since then I’ve also changed the header of my website to this font as well, I rather like it!)

A suitable photo 

This was something I’d wracked my brain over in the past, and for my college portfolio book, it was actually my tutor who spotted the perfect one, and it was one I’d never even considered.

The criteria I used for this were:  Something with impact – it’s got to catch the eye, so it needs something with strong composition, that complements the title or the subject, and sets the tone for the book.

For Mechanical Landscapes, I like to think that the one that I chose met the criteria, as it’s black and white (like the photos in the book), it’s got an industrial landscape on (which is the theme of the book) and the rails help act in as lead in lines (although they are partially obscured by the book title). I’m sure that a professional book designer would have created something better, but I’m pleased with the result.

Layout   

For the ultimate in flexibility, do it in Photoshop, or get someone else to do it! Failing that, use what’s available in Booksmart. There are quite a few options in terms of where the text goes, and it can then be centred, aligned left, right, top, middle, bottom, etc. Think carefully about it’s positioning over the photograph – is it obscuring anything?

Of course, you could just have a solid colour as a background, and even put no text on it if you have no imagination or are going for a real avant-garde look!

Back Cover

Don’t forget that books have a back cover as well. Do you want a full page image, one that is a solid colour with a smaller photo inset, or just a solid colour and text? An image should be a strong image but not one that is stronger than the cover image.

Final Review    

Give the book one last read through. Remember, Booksmart doesn’t have a spell-check, so if you’ve any text you should read it through several times, or copy it into a word processor that has a spell check function.

One other thing to check is the spine of the book. Over a certain number of pages (40 I think), Booksmart does (or it used to) automatically put in the name of the book in a default font. This has caught me out at least once, so do a proper review in the preview section of Booksmart, as once you’ve uploaded the book, that’s it!

Upload, Order, Wait and Enjoy!    

OK, so the books done, now you’ll need to upload it. TIP: go put the kettle on and ake yourself a cup of tea, as this can take time, especially for a large photo book with lots of photos.

When it’s done, you can then select the paper type and binding, and once you’ve paid, it’s out of your hands! Just sit back and wait for a large package to arrive! It’s well worth the wait to see the end result of the hours of time you’ve put in, and you can’t beat seeing your own photos in a book you’ve created!

#130 – People in railway photographs

The overwhelming majority of railway photographs tend to be of the hardware, but I find it just as interesting to take photographs of the people on the railway as well. This is a subject that is rarely covered by railway photographers, but why is that? I think people who are involved with the railways are often (but not always) quite reserved people who don’t like having their picture taken, plus from the photographers perspective, taking pictures of people in public is not an easy or comfortable experience in this day and age where people often view anyone with a camera as either a potential terrorist or a paedophile. Plus if you’re interested in taking pictures of people, you’d be a wedding, portrait or street photographer, yes? Well, not necessarily. Having a few people photographs in the collection can make a welcome relief, especially if you’re in the habit of showing your photographs to non-railway photographers.

Unfortunately, I’m not terribly good at people photography myself. I try, but ultimately not often enough to have become proficient! If anything, it shouldn’t be too hard a task though as stations are full of people, so there’s no lack of potential. And of course, it is people who run the railways.

Taken using the long end of a 28-100 zoom. The driver was actually texting on his mobile phone, which I though would have made a great contrast to the steam engine, but by the time I’d taken it, he’d lowered it down the side of the cab wall. Taken on  HP5 film.

Taken using the long end of a 24-70, this fireman caught my glance as he was taking to someone on the platform. Taken in colour, but works better in monochrome as there is less distraction.

I wanted to include the young lad in the picture as he was dressed as a station master, but wasn’t sure how to. This seemed to be the best way of doing it.

If you’re not into asking directly, then the key is to be discreet about it, and use the engines and other railway infrastructure as the backdrop, rather than going for out-and-out people only photos. That way, you are giving the picture some context.

Candid photographs can work very well, as they capture people doing whatever they are doing, and not posing for a picture. These can be taken bold as brass by pointing the camera a them in full view, or by being a little more discretely with a longer lens. Alternatively, using a wider angle lens can include people in the frame without even pointing the camera at them. I prefer to mingle on the platform, camera at the ready but by my side, and wander round watching what’s going on.  If an engine is taking on water running round, or waiting, then there will always be activity from the drivers, guards and other staff, and if people are occupied doing something, then they are less likely to notice someone taking pictures, and therefore act more naturally.

Finally, people don’t have to be close up, or even recognisable. I’ve always thought that these pictures were improved by the people even though they are some distance away or are cast in shadow. 

 

Ribble Steam Railway. High-ISO, hand-held grab shot using a stabilised lens – it shouldn’t have come out, but it did somehow thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

9F at East Lancs Railway, November 2005. Shooting into the early morning sun made for a centre-jour effect and resulted in quite heavy shadows. I only converted it to monochrome several years after to get rid of some ruinous lens flare, and ended up liking the result.

#125 – Tilted Compositions 2

Site of what was (I think) the Group 2 area of Royal Ordnance Chorley, now Buckshaw Village. It’s all been cleared and graded, this single lump of reinforced concrete is pretty much the only remnant of anything resembling structural engineering.

From a photographic perspective, the tilted compositions hasn’t worked here - a super wide angle lens would have been better (although this was taken on Panasonic LX-3 compact rather than an SLR, and it only goes as wide as 24mm), due to the way in which the foreground can be brought very close to the front of the frame, and the way in which the image is distorted. It just looks accidental, which goes to show that care must be taken when using this composition.