Country Railroading

 

My girlfriend called across the tracks, "Did it stop?" "No, just slow." Having spent the last 15 years or so chasing trains around the speedy Northeast Corridor and Southern Transcon, I could understand her confusion. But this was Hugoton, Kansas and the trains on the Cimarron Valley Railroad take their good old time.
We had passed the train on the road, a little ways back, and pulled up to the next grade crossing. I lit a cigarette, finished it, rechecked my camera settings, rechecked the sun, tried a few more angles, made sure the cigarette was out, stared at a horse, and finally, the train.

Hereford, Texas

 

 

 

 

Railfanning Hereford is as easy as driving down U.S. Route 60, which parallel's the BNSF line through town. There is a city park, next to the old AT&SF station where one can watch the trains go by all day. The station is still active railroad property, so stay off of that. The park is very small and has no bathroom facilities, but there are plenty of places nearby for that. The trains are plentiful, the park comfortable, and the weather usually sunny.
These pictures were taken by my friend Kim (Canon 40D), who is very methodical. Notice how she photographed all the main elements of her last picture before combining them into one composition. She did all that in a very short time frame, as the locomotive in the last photograph is the trailing engine from the train in the first photograph. When you can jump out of a car, at a strange location, and do that kind of work in just a few minutes, you can rightfully call yourself a photographer. I, on the other hand, am not a photographer, not yet.

Getting Stuff Into Your Pictures

Stuff. 

Not much stuff.

I like getting close-up photos of moving trains (like the one on the left), such pictures can be dramatic and technically challenging to accomplish. But I think it's good to include the surrounding environment too. Railroads don't operate in a vacuum. The above photograph shows the train,  grade crossing (implied), cattle guard, the name of the ranch the tracks go through, mailboxes, desert flora, the name of the road crossing the tracks, rolling stock, a locomotive with the door open (indicating the train has stopped), and plenty of sky. Such details anchor the photo in time and space, making it more interesting to more people, and perhaps useful to viewers in years to come. Pictures should say more than their captions. It's not an either/or question, both kinds of shots are good, and it's usually a matter of circumstances as to what kind of shot I take. In this instance, I could have easily walked onto the grade crossing and shot the train head-on, but I wanted all that stuff in the picture. The stuff adds a rural, Southwestern dimension.
We live in an era that makes it tempting to remove stuff from our photos, making a cleaner shot, perhaps, but also a more sterile one. If you Photoshop out all the stuff you don't like in a picture (utility poles, trash, cars, people, etc.), your photograph becomes a work of fiction. There's nothing wrong with photographing fiction, but, like writing, it should be labeled as such.
Many years ago, there was a photographer named John Collier, who, more or less, invented a field of work known as visual anthropology. The thing about Collier is that he showed that such work didn't have to be strictly utilitarian, he took great pictures that were loaded with useful data. When photographing the world as it is, stuff and data are, oftener than not, synonymous.

Would this picture of a stove, by John Collier, be more interesting without the people in it?