Some photos of my railfanning around the East Bay 2017

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Thanks. You're making me homesick for California. I used to spend weekends camped at Tehachapi Loop. The only freight trains here in Orlando now run at night and weekends since SunRail bought the tracks. And the closest hill is hundreds of miles away.
 
Thanks. You're making me homesick for California. I used to spend weekends camped at Tehachapi Loop. The only freight trains here in Orlando now run at night and weekends since SunRail bought the tracks. And the closest hill is hundreds of miles away.

We have a lot of trains up here in the PNW Art. One minor detail, taken from records at my house. In February we had 6 days "with out" rain or rain/snow mix and in March we had 5 days "with out" rain. Assuming: of the total of 11 days with out rain, 50% were overcast at best, that leaves you with about 5.5 days of some % of sunshine out of 59 days.

They tell me its going to get better.

BTW Itsed, your photos continue to be spectacular.
 
We have a lot of trains up here in the PNW Art. One minor detail, taken from records at my house. In February we had 6 days "with out" rain or rain/snow mix and in March we had 5 days "with out" rain. Assuming: of the total of 11 days with out rain, 50% were overcast at best, that leaves you with about 5.5 days of some % of sunshine out of 59 days.

They tell me its going to get better.

BTW Itsed, your photos continue to be spectacular.

The Puget Sound region is setting all sorts of lousy weather records this year.
 
Do you use Photoshop? If you do, did you know that sometime back Adobe added a filter called "Camera Raw" which allows you to process JPEGs with the same functions that were available only for CAMERA RAW before. Mostly, it just allows you to screw up an image in a different way, but the "Dehaze" filter can sometimes reduce some of the atmospheric haze from long shots. It usually screws up the sky, so it's better for scenes with no or minimal sky. But it brings out the color in those overstuffed velvet-upholstered California hills.

A tutorial here:

Art
 
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I use Lightroom and Photoshop and shoot only RAW. This file was already pretty processed. The main problem is that the hills are pretty far away. The compression of the zoom makes them look closer than they are, and it was a warm day making a lot of atmospheric distortion. Shooting into the morning sun didn't help either. I've used dehaze occasionally but I find it crushes a lot of detail.
 
I use Lightroom and Photoshop and shoot only RAW. This file was already pretty processed. The main problem is that the hills are pretty far away. The compression of the zoom makes them look closer than they are, and it was a warm day making a lot of atmospheric distortion. Shooting into the morning sun didn't help either. I've used dehaze occasionally but I find it crushes a lot of detail.

You can't win, of course. The photo of SF 188 is better with the haze because it makes the foreground subject really pop out. The last time I seriously took pictures of trains I shot film and Photoshop was at v.1. I had a 400mm, but never thought of using it for trains. Wish I had, now that I've seen your stuff. Wish I was back in the West...
 
Have you tried a circular polarizing filter (CPF) to get rid of haze? I used one a few years ago when I went to my 45 year high school reunion in Lewiston, ID. The skies in eastern Washington and northern Idaho were very hazy from the smoke of wildfires. The CPF did a good job of removing the haze. The skies in the photos of the following threads would have been a very ugly gray if not for the CPF.

Four railroad photos using the filter can be seen in the first post of this thread:
http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/showthread.php?44850-Class-Reunion-Trip

Some non-railroad photos of eastern Washington using the CPF can be seen on these threads.
http://www.pnwphotos.com/forum/showthread.php?8875-Kamiak-Butte-County-ParK

http://www.pnwphotos.com/forum/showthread.php?8874-Palouse-Falls-State-Park
 
I have used them in the past, but they can have some funky effects on moving targets. Also I use so many different lenses at different sizes, I would go nuts trying to keep track of what was installed where. I just accept that when in the valley in 3 out of 4 seasons, the skies are going to be dull because it just has some of the worst pollution in the country. I save the filters for more deliberate landscape work when I can take my time to set everything up.
 




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