Railroads | Gage Caudell

Repost from July 2011

My wife and I spent 4 years in Des Moines, IA while I was receiving my degree. The first couple years I was vey busy with my work and never showed much interest in photography. Midway through my second year, my father lost his year long battle with cancer. When he passed I inherited his film dSLR and lenses. Not until later in the year did I finally gain an interest in photography. Initially, I was just taking pictures in the operating room for the physicians I was rotating with. I remember getting many compliments doing this and thought it came somewhat natural. Canon came out with the EOS 20d (you can find the most recent version, Canon EOS 60D here). I remember how excited I was to get this and try out my dads lenses. Since then, I’ve traded, bought, and upgraded from the Canon 20d and his lenses.

Many years have passed since purchasing my first dSLR and I’ve now moved on to Leica M9 rangefinder camera but I still have many good pics that I took. One of those was from a trip back to Des Moines a few years ago. I was driving around Booneville, IA and came across this old railroad bridge. At that time I was starting to show some interest in HDR photography. Below is one of those pics (I also posted it in black and white).

Often, photographers are attempting to find symmetry or patterns within their environment that would be eye catching. This picture is a great example.

I was standing in the airport waiting to get on one of the trains and noticed the adjacent train sitting there. I noticed the ceiling tiles, train doors, windows, floor tiles, and even the trash can all had a similar linear pattern. I felt this would be a great place to focus on the train and hope that a subject would walk through. Fortunately, I got lucky. This man carrying a piece of paper walked right where I wanted him. I love that I caught him in mid stride because his front leg, back foot, upper torso, and paper all became symmetric with the environment. By focusing on the train, I was able to blur the subject so the viewer could get a sense of motion.

The Leica M9 is not only known for its great color pics, it’s probably better known for its black and white images. I have to admit, the M9 does a phenomenal job of creating black and white pics. It’s hard to describe what it is but the M9 just has that extra touch when creating these type of images. I don’t routinely shoot in black and white while using the camera. I shoot in raw (uncompressed picture format) and then edit it with Niks Software Silver Efex Pro 2. If you like monochrome images, this is the software to purchase. I have owned just the aperture plugin and now own the Photoshop CS5 plugin and prefer having the Photoshop plugin because it just makes a new layer instead of altering the original pic like it does in Aperture.

Soon after purchasing my black M9 (I have not moved on to the M9-P) I traveled to Cleveland for a conference and on my way home I stopped and shot a few pics. This pic, originally in color was edited in Silver Efex Pro 2. Let me know what you think?

If you haven’t noticed I have an interest in railroad tracks. Probably, most photographers do. I think a lot of it has to do with the rust, age, and symmetry of these structures. They often, can make a boring landscape interesting. I also like taking pics of railroad signs. This one was taken on a small dirt road. As you can probably tell, it was not often used therefore there was no need to change the sign.

I’ve posted other pics from this location on my Flickr and 500px sites. I recently traveled back and grabbed a few pics with my Leica M9. I’ve mentioned previously how much I like the bokeh of Leica lenses. In this picture you can see how well it focuses just a small portion of the foreground and completely blurs the background. There’s an old run down bridge in the background but is obviously difficult to see. The composition allows for some imagination of what is ahead.

Gage Caudell

Tag Archives: Railroads

The Iron Skeleton

Motion & Symmetry

The Crossing

Abandoned Crossing

Unclear Path

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