Route 66 railroad exhibit

Jordan and I were out doing some Christmas shopping earlier this week. We found some gifts for mom and daughter, but while we were out, I decided to stop to show him this old locomotive that had been quietly rusting away in the rail yard here in Owasso. It's being restored at a site west of Tulsa near Red Fork along with an old Pullman car, a tanker, and a caboose. Eventually the site will be a transportation museum.




It will take a lot of time and money to fully restore this Pullman. It was damaged when an adjoining car was set afire by vandals, and time has not been kind. This is the kitchen. It's roughly the size of my daughter's closet, big enough for two people to stand if they're careful with knives and elbows.



This was the dining area. Small tables and chaired lined either side, and that area at the back was the sun room. All the windows were broken by vandals. They're covered temporarily with plywood and high-impact plastic sheets. The volunteer workers said they'd found a cache of brass fittings for all the windows and doors, but as brass is so expensive they were reluctant to attach the hardware. It's certainly possible to reproduce that with a 3D printer, so that may be a better alternative.

DeSoto Suburban

The used car lot has a 'new' old car. This is a Desoto Suburban. It's the forerunner of all those boxy SUVs cluttering up parking lots everywhere. This is a beast of a car. It's gigantic.

I played with the high dynamic range gadget on Zoner Photo Studio this week. The shot above is a normal exposure. The one below is a composite of three exposures: the one above, and two that were under and over exposed by one stop. I like the way it brings out shadow detail.



I reshot the locomotive over on the west side, too. I was there about mid morning and the sun was already high. Contrast was high too. This first one is the HDR image.


These two look very similar, but when I set them up in a viewer and switched back and forth between them, it appeared that the HDR image had the sun coming from a lower angle than the 'straight' image. Still, this one appears fairly natural, and in all fairness, the Desoto verges on being cartoonish. But I still like it.

Guess what I found?

My Kodak Z1285 will do automatic bracketing! Well, maybe you don't get excited about this, but I do. In burst mode, it will take three shots with as much as plus or minus one stop. This means I can tinker with high dynamic range photography in Zoner Photo Studio.

That photo up above in an HDR image. This next one is the 'middle' exposure that it's based on. Click through for the full size photos.



OK, maybe you're not as excited about it as I am, but try to understand the background. Ansel Adams devised the Zone System over 70 years ago. Among other things, it's photography that mimics the way we see. Our eyes and brains put together images that have extreme contrast from light to dark. An object might be in full sunlight in part of our visual field and in deep shade in another, yet we can see all of it. Film and digital cameras don't see that way. They can extract detail from only one part of the field, so if the light parts are properly exposed, the dark parts are lost.

HDR takes multiple images at different exposures and combines them.

Of course, what's a day without some rusty - or formerly rusty - old equipment? This locomotive was quietly decaying in the Owasso rail yard until a group of local enthusiasts bought it and restored it. It's now on display across from Webster School along Old Route 66 (Southwest Boulevard) in Tulsa. And yes, I tinkered with it, but it's not an HDR image. Maybe next time.

I did stumble across a nice old truck, though. This was over-exposed so I played with the image.



I'll have to go back and revisit some of those places armed with new knowledge about getting better images. Oh, and before I forget, there are more over on my Picasa web albums. I uploaded some dance photos from Skiatook, and added to the existing albums for old cars and railroad stuff. I used three cameras: the Nikon N6006, the Kodak Z1285, and the workhorse Yashica Electro 35GT.