Behind the Locomotive: Graffiti & Pushing

Some people think that the best railroad photographs are the "wedgies"
of the locomotives and that all other railroad pictures are "bad
motives." But, this is not true. We may be full of ourselves, but we
like non-traditional photographs. We like to push our minds into more
creative images. I was listening to my boss talk the other day as he
was lecturing our Photo 1 class at the community college and he was
talking about "stop" and it's many uses in photography. "Push" has many
uses too, as well as "Pull".

We can push and pull our exposures to see what we can get out of them.
This can get tricky, but it's fun to try. When processing film, we can
pull or push process to give us a richer negative, when we know that
we've overexposed or underexposed. I like watching the trains pushing
and pulling in yards. I call it "rocking the yard". Finally,
if you push yourself, you will be amazed at what you find out.

If you stay and watch the entire train, you'll see lots of interesting
images pass. The graffiti is so much fun! I caught this one while I
was on vacation in Folkston, GA.

I like to think of RR graffiti as moving art that is often very creative. As I was working
this image to apply it to this article I remembered another important thing about
photography, "Expose for shadows and develop for highlights." I'm trying to figure how
this applies to digital, since we aren't actually developing our "film" and for now I'm
thinking "Expose for shadows and shoot in RAW", but not in the raw, because that
would be indecent exposure. ;)
- K.C.