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MORNING SUN BOOKS


These all-color 128-page hardcover books will be available March 1, 2013


ERIE LACKAWANNA VOLUME 8:


NEW YORK DIVISION By Robert J. Yanosey Item# 1469


Louisiana & North West F7s crossing the Illinois Central Gulf main line in Gibsland, Louisiana, 1982. Olympus XA.


no longer be available or hard to find, and older low mega pixel P&S cameras that are no longer being made, these stories illustrate what is possible in general with any low end camera, even current cell phone cameras. As is pointed out, the key is to use them within their capabilities and limitations.)


Small Point-and-Shoots


In 1982 on one of my visits to my parents in Monroe, La., my good friend Bob Karsten, at the time living in Ruston and writing fea- ture articles for Carstens Publications, in- troduced me to the Louisiana & North West in near-by Gibsland, which operated a fleet of old ex-Southern Pacific and ex-Western Pacific F7s. On a subsequent visit, I got the idea of doing a magazine article for Rail Classics magazine on this operation. Prob- lem was I had only a small Olympus XA 35mm P&S camera with me, and at the time I normally railfanned back home in Col- orado with a medium format Pentax 6×7 and 35mm Nikon SLR. I had purchased the XA so I could have a


PITTSBURGH TROLLEYS


VOLUME 1 By Ed Ridolph Item# 1470


STEELMILL RAILROADS


VOLUME 4


By Stephen M. Timko Item# 1471


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14 FEBRUARY 2013 • RAILFAN.COM


camera with me at all times if I came across a news worthy event for a newspaper I was freelancing for, as it was small enough to carry in a shirt pocket. While the XA is a good camera, it was not quite up to snuff compared to a good 35mm SLR, but fine for newspaper work where top quality in a big enlargement was not an issue.


But I knew the XA would be limited in what I could do trackside. It had a fixed 35mm lens, which was manually focused us- ing a small lever, not very efficient for action photography. It was all automatic exposure, meaning I could not use manual exposure to overcome the XA’s penchant for yielding poorly exposed slides due to tricky lighting and faulty meter operation. While B&W negatives made good prints, my Ko- dachromes had washed out color. To compound matters, I was not familiar with the 100 mile L&NW which ran between Gibsland, where it interchanged with the Illinois Central Gulf and another short line, the North Louisiana and Gulf, and McNeil, Ark.,with an interchange with the Cotton Belt. I would not have time to come back an- other day, and I would need to juggle both color transparencies and B&W film in the one camera.


But intrigued, I set about planning how I could overcome my little camera’s shortcom- ings. I figured that by setting the ASA dial (ISO was still called ASA in the 1980s) to


125 rather than Kodachrome’s 64, the cam- era would “underexpose” my slides to com- pensate for the one stop overexposure the autoexposure was giving, and I could double check the meter’s readings against the old “sunny 16” rule of thumb (which states that in full sun, correct exposure is always 1/ISO at ƒ16, which for Kodachrome 64 meant ¹⁄₆₀ second at ƒ16, or the equivalent ¹⁄₂₅₀ at ƒ8). To offset the slow focusing of the little


camera, I was able to find good photo loca- tions ahead of the train as it stopped to switch the businesses it served, and preset my composition and focus. I looked for com- positions that best took advantage of the lens’s limited power, or used its good depth of field to advantage. I also searched for un- usual angles rather than simply recording the train. I was able to frame the F’s through the porch posts of an old country store, caught the train picking up orders on the run at another location, captured a nice shot of an F by a freight platform while the crew went to beans, and got the F’s with their ca- boose over the diamond across the ICG main line in Gibsland. To have a chance of loading the right type of film (color or B&W), I would have to try to foresee what I would encounter as I chased the train, very tricky indeed since I was so unfamiliar with the line. I planned to use ASA 125 Plus-X for the bulk of the work, ASA 400 Tri-X if the lighting went cloudy, and Kodachrome for scenic and roster shots. Yes, I missed some shots due to the 35mm


lens. I would have loved having even a small telephoto to capture the train on several straight stretches of uneven rail. And while the 35mm lens was almost too tight for prop- er framing in the small Gibsland yard, it was okay for many other locations. My technique to “fool” the exposure meter


by playing with the ASA setting worked, as all my slides came out perfectly exposed. I was also able to fool the meter to allow a nice b&w silhouetted shot against a bright back- ground of brakeman Ralph Whitlock waiting for his engine looming out of the fog in Mc- Neil. And when photographing inside the Gibsland diesel shop, I again tricked the au- tomatic meter by setting the ASA two stops slower to compensate for the bright areas of outside light I knew would cause the camera to underexpose in the darkened interior. These images have all printed beautifully


as large as 16×20, and the fog shot and the ICG crossing shots remain today as two of my all-time treasured railfan shots, along


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