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CJSutcliffe — Charging Princess
Published: 2010-01-06 19:36:21 +0000 UTC; Views: 2871; Favourites: 110; Downloads: 91
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Description
Shot into the sun, and possibly the only time you'll find gricers on Nuthurst Road bridge, LMS Princess Royal Class number 6201 "Princess Elizabeth" charges up the incline from Manchester Victoria on Sunday 13th December 2009, heading up the York Yuletide Express from Liverpool Lime Street that morning.EDIT: The original had quite some glare on it caused by the sun reflecting back from off the lens and being captured in the final image. To remedy this, I altered the levels, brightness and contrast considerably, then added saturation, highlights and shadow enhancements, before rebalancing the colour slightly to finish off the image. The smoke remains overexposed, nothing much one can do about that, and one would have to exchange sun glare for contrasty ballast work at the bottom of the photo. Overall, I am pleased with the results.
Most Popular Transportation Deviation, 6th January 2010
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Comments: 27
This is most certainly a dramatic moment captured just as the train came round the bend into sight, with full plume of steam, and the ability to clearly see its identity on the front. The composition is good and I can imagine standing above it in anticipation of the smell of sulphur just about to envelop me - and the hope that there wouldn't be a notice anywhere near saying "Whistle" just as this was about to happen!
I like the composition and the content very much. However, the fact that as you say, you were shooting into the sun, together with the presence of the steam, unfortunately didn't do any favours for the shot, as it looks as though there was glare coming back onto the lens causing a kind of glaze all over the picture which has slightly obscured the vivid colours there would have been, and also caused the appearance of slightly inferior quality, particularly when looking at the tracks and ground in the foreground of the larger view of the image. This in turn has also caused the whiteness of the steam to be over-emphasized giving the appearance of it looking blown out.
I can see that this would have been quite a dilemma in the timing of things, and considering the circumstances, and that it is a telephoto shot too, you have produced a good result, which if taken with the sun in a different position or even with very diffuse sunlight, may well have turned out to be excellent.
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I have taken your points into mind, and performed some further adjustments to the photo regarding your critique. I think I managed to remove some, if not all, of the excess noise and glare you mentioned, and I managed to add colour and bring out further detail through shadow enhancements. If you're interested I could add it to my gallery in my scraps folder for you to take a look at before I maybe replace this version.
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I'd love to see it! Can you let me know when it's there as I'm away from home at the moment and have everyone I watch switched off except for my groups?
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This is a huge improvement over the original one and looks far more dynamic for sure. Unfortunately there is some clipping of the whites in the steam, where you've managed to get more shadows/shading into it, but the truly blown out areas prevail with a kind of border marking around them? The only other thing is that the scene has become slightly over-contrasty, making the gravel in between the rail lines very dark and blurry looking. You could almost crop the lower section of the image, say to where the grass on the right starts to show at the edge; and something I'd try to do would be to very lightly clone some of the lighter areas of steam into the blown-out and clipped areas to see if it were possible to make it look better that way; really you need another photo with steam in it to do this from, and I know that's sort of cheating, but if it would make the improvement that's needed I see nothing wrong in doing that.
I'd like to see this again when I get home again, as my laptop screen is not the best for giving accurate assessments of photos with; I don't do any of my own processing using this screen!
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Oh yes, 100% pukka locomotive, I love this engine so much.
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Can imagine this in b&w and it would be like stepping back in time, super image and lovely composition. Well captured, I really like this a lot.
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A particularly good effort when as you say, you were shooting into the sun.
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