Choo Choo!

 
Overthinking The Assignment: I spent a fair amount of time wondering how to present the event. It was the 160th Anniversary of this rail route which connected San Francisco to San Jose. It was also the debut of the new electric commuter train. It was also an informational event to promote modern mass transit.

The Basic Photo: Any time there is a train involved, I try to get at least one photo of some passengers boarding. In this case, I looked for a door that had the Caltrain logon clearly visible. I also prefer to make the photo from the left side of the boarding passengers because the majority will probably be right handed, and  will tend to rotate their bodies towards the camera when reaching for a hand rail.

This doesn't look like a flash-assisted shot, but it is. I narrowed the beam to concentrate the light at the center with the hopes of lighting up the inside of the train. I like that the photo doesn't shout "Flash!", but it helped me keep the exposure differences between the shadows and the highlight are minimal.

The High Tech Loo: The state-of-the-art bathroom was a source of pride among the docents. Caltrain created focus groups to gather rider input, and created a mock bathroom to test its usability by disabled passengers. It also included a folding changing table should the need would arise. Incidentally, the door is actually curved, giving the image a fisheye look. 

This shot was made with a camera mounted  Godox V1 flash and a Godox Dome Diffuser. The head was angled to 45 degrees from horizontal  to raise the light a bit farther from the lens axis. The easy attach/detach design of the diffuser combined with the 330 degree head rotation make it an easy flash to adjust on the fly. And adjust you will, because each situation will bring new challenges that will force you to tweak you flash to get the image you want.

After a while, I decided to shoot from inside the  restroom. This perspective makes it much easier for the viewer to figure out exactly what they were looking at. The young boy added a sense of curiosity to the image, which was exactly what I wanted. I thought for a moment that this would be the shot I would submit, but realized that shot has no context clues that would lead the reader to the concept of "train", and the idea was subsequently scrapped. 

For this shot, I pointed the flash head towards the ceiling behind me and kept the diffusion dome in place. This saturated the tiny room with light, and the resulting photo would have reproduced well when printed on newsprint.

Anniversary Aspect: I saw nothing to indicate that this was the 160th anniversary of the route run between San Francisco and San Jose. There was a table, manned by Caltrain employees, where you could get pamphlets describing the innovations baked into the new electric trains, along with miniature toy trains for the kids (right).

Here again, flash was used to provide some detail in the shaded areas under the enclosure. Some dodging and burning was required to "normalized" the overall exposure while maintaining the notion that the Caltrain employee was actually standing in the shadow of the little tent.

Photo Boom! This considerate young man apologized to me when he accidentally entered the frame, adding he didn't intend to photobomb me. I smiled and told him not to worry because I was just checking my exposure, and then added, "Why don't you photobomb me for real?" This was his immediate response. It still makes me chuckle.

Lucky Shot: I decided to make another attempt at a boarding photograph from the front-lit side. While waiting for something to happen in the foreground, I heard a mother tell her young son that a train was approaching the station from camera right. I turned to see that it was indeed approaching, and that a shot with both new and old trains might be possible. In the second photo, you can see that the train has entered the frame and is slowing to a stop, but continued to roll forward. I managed to get my last shot just as the "noses" of the two trains appeared to be side by side. In a few seconds, the second train was completely hidden by the first.

This Is A First: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I was surprised that the photo did not appear in the Monday edition of the paper. After all, news photos like this have a very short shelf life. It ran on Tuesday, and to my surprise, it  was published with a two-page article. So I have to wonder if the story was always in the wings, or written to accompany the photo. My ego can come to one conclusion. Guess what it is.