01/24/08

Greetings.  That's me above, waiting for a train at South Junction, Oregon on the Oregon Trunk in September 2004.  Photo by Mike Overlie, c 2008

I have been taking photographs of trains since 1970.  The quality and artistry of some of my early work isn't always the best, but if I can fix it, I'll show you some of the bygone era of railroading before the current world of 2 major western railroads.  I also like the railroading of today - so you can't escape Dash 9's on this site either!  The one thing I have learned about train photography over the years - you just simply have to get out and shoot.  I didn't get out much in the 70's and 80's and both the technical and artistic sides of my work suffered as a result.

Cameras:  I started with an all manual rangefinder - the Argus C-3 and have had several Minolta cameras (SRT 101 and X-700) and currently use a Nikon F100.  As of July 2003, I entered the digital world with the Fuji FinePix S2.  I replaced the Fuji DSLR in February 2006 with a Nikon D2x.  Unlike many Digital shooters, I still am shooting slides along side the DSLR.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. 

Film:  Everybody has an opinion on film and my opinion is not the standard rail-fan's opinion.  A great deal of my photographs were shot on Agfachrome, Kodak Lumiere and for about the last eleven years, my film of choice has been Fuji Velva RVP (50 iso).

Digital:  All slides and negatives have been scanned on a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000.  I use Hamrick VueScan software for the scanning software hamrick.com.  I cannot recommend this software enough!  It does an outstanding job of processing a great variety of slide film and color negative film!!   I then process the images to a web friendly size using Adobe Photoshop CS2.  I use a number of Fred Miranda's Plugins for Photoshop for file processing.  All digital photographs with the S2 were taken in the RAW mode and converted to TIFF's using Fuji's supplied software.  The Nikon D2x files are converted using Nikon Capture NX or Phase One, Capture One LE software.   At the end of the conversion process the files are converted to JPEG's for the website.  This web was created using Microsoft's FrontPage 2002.