Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Trains are wonderful…. To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.—Agatha Christie
National Train Day is observed every year on the Saturday closest to May 10 and this year it falls on May 9. National Train Day marks the completion of the transcontinental railroad across the United States. At Promontory, Utah at the Promontory summit, a golden Spike was driven by Leland Stanford to connect the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad. The holiday was first celebrated in 2008 and continues being celebrated each year. Amtrak conceptualized this day as a way to spread awareness about the history of railway networks in the U.S. and to encourage more people should use this mode of transport.
How I made this photograph: This was one of the infrared images that I made with an IR-converted Canon EOS 50D at the Colorado Railroad Museum. On a camera with an APS-C sized sensor, like the EOS 50D, this Tamron lens has the same angle-of-view as a 45-480mm lens. Exposure for this shot was 1/50 sec at f/16 and ISO 400 with a plus two-thirds stop exposure compensation. After processing in Silver Efex, the RAW file was platinum toned using PhotoKit giving the photograph an appropriate “old timey” look.
Testing a Lens with Trains!
When I was testing the Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens, I took it to one of my favorite places, the Colorado Railroad Museum, along with two Canon DSLR bodies. The cameras were an EOS 5D Mark I along with an EOS 50D that had been converted to infrared capture by LifePixel.using their Standard IR (720nm) infrared filter. The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit museum located on 15 acres at a point where Clear Creek flows between North and South Table Mountains in Golden, Colorado.
The Tamron lens features four LD (Low Dispersion) glass elements, three molded-glass aspherical elements, one hybrid aspherical element, one XR (Extra Refractive Index) glass element, an element of UXR (Ultra-Extra Refractive Index) glass with a higher refractive index than XR and a partridge in a pear tree. Tamron’s 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens lives up to the company’s reputation for producing Swiss Army Knife lenses that are sharp as well as versatile.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve done some of the conversions for my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.
New copies of my book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography are available from Amazon for $41.79, with used copies selling for around twelve bucks, as I write this. New copes of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects that has a chapter on IR photography are available from Amazon for a$30.19 as I write this.