Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: tri-x

This is a photo that I took of Strasburg #90, a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0, during the summer of 1997. It was one of a series that I still regard among my best black and white photos ever taken of a steam locomotive. This is my favorite one because it shows off the details the best of the series, in my opinion, and it is a little bit more abstract than the others, even if it's still clearly a steam locomotive smokebox. I used a Nikon N6006 with a Nikkor 35-50 zoom and Kodak Tri-X 400 film. I had just learned to shoot proper black and white in the semester or two before I shot this, and this was my first real success with black and white rail photography, so that also adds to the significance of this. Hopefully sometime in the future I'll get around to posting the others.

This is part of the same series as Strasburg #90, Picture 3 (go figure :-)). This one, though, may have the most well-rounded artistic merit of the series, as it has abstraction, the best contrast, the best detail, and so on.

I've always liked this photo, even if many serious photographers haven't. They say it's "boring," but most of them aren't railfans! From the technical point of view, the contrast is a bit low, but since it was a gloomy Plattsburgh winter day, if I were to up the contrast on this, the detail and the grit of the scene would be lost. For the railfans, though, it's a nice shot of an F40PH in the last years of F40 haulage on Train #68, the "Adirondack."

This photo is a little bit grainy, which is a result of a high-contrast print being fed into a primitive scanner. I apologize in advance for that, but I posted it anyway because I love the composition. Maybe in the future I'll post a rescanned one, but for now this will have to do.

This was taken minutes after my "arriving in" shot, which has gotten so much attention. I've been praised for the puddle reflection on this shot, but I'm posting this mainly because it goes with the other one.

Some days you just get lucky. The weather is perfect, the light is perfect, your camera performs flawlessly, you're in all the right places at the right times, and you have a phenomenal subject. Actually, Strasburg #90, while beautiful, isn't the most spectacular steam locomotive you could ever find. It's just a Baldwin Standard Decapod 2-10-0 from the 1920s that was designed for hauling freight on branchlines, but it's big and bulky enough to give the impression of massive, overwhelming force. On this particular day, I wasn't in Strasburg to take photographs, but to do documentary research, but I got very lucky coming out of the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum in that #90 was there exactly when I was, and it was a blazing hot summer day. You can see the brightness of the sun in the pictures, and although the originals are fine, the scans look more bleached. It's the only shame in displaying them here, as my old Omniscan came nowhere close to doing the photos justice.

Here's another one, as it started to move!!

Railroad photographers often like photographing the valve gear, in this case Walschaerts, if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm getting this wrong!!!).

This is the turbogenerator, as #90 is new enough to have an electrical system, at least for lighting, anyway.

There's the Baldwin builder plate, although in general the photo is interesting, I think.

This one isn't even on my website. :-) It's a firearms view of the drivers, which I have changed my mind about since getting such an immense response to my rail-related black and whites.

Plattsburgh is known for its winters, and right after I got my first-ever SLR (my Nikon N6006), and began learning black and white photography properly, I instantly tried to take advantage of the bad weather to take dramatic photos. This was a blizzard on the 24th of February, 1998 (when I found this today, I also found the exact date!!), and this shot shows us some of SUNY Plattsburgh's highrise dorms, with Adirondack Hall, the newest of the lowrises as of then, on the lower right. This one, in original form, looks better, but my teacher thought I was crazy. What do you think of this shot, though?

I took a lot of photos of Amtrak trains coming in and out of Plattsburgh when I studied there. This is one of my favorites, of an F40PH with some kind of wreck damage on the nose.

This is one of my only, and perhaps my only, good shot of an F40PH taken from above. This was a southbound, which could only be train 68, the "Adirondack" for New York Penn. It's slowing for Plattsburgh station, which is in the distance, around the curve and on the right side of the tracks.

Here's...another F40PH!! :-) This one is departing Plattsburgh, southbound with Train 68.

I never went to SU as a student, but when I attended a convention there I was astonished by how much better run the place was than Plattsburgh!! :-) The buildings were also older in many cases, and consequently much prettier. My favorite was the Hall of Languages, and I tried my best to get a good black and white of it, and this is what I got. :-) Built in 1873, it illustrates quite well, I think, how Americans could indeed build a beautiful building in those days if they were serious about it. SU has this to say about it: "Opened in 1873, the Hall of Languages is Syracuse University's oldest building and stood as its sole structure for 14 years. Constructed under the tenure of SU's first Chancellor, Alexander Winchell, the Hall of Languages was built of Onondaga limestone in the then-popular Second Empire style for $136,000. Originally, there were to be six more buildings erected in the same style, including the Hall of Science, the Hall of Philosophy, and the Hall of History. A harsh economic recession ended those plans, however, leaving the Hall of Languages as the sole monument to the University's earliest campus plan. Home of The College of Arts and Sciences, the building was renovated in 1978, but retained its elegant exterior architecture. The Hall of Languages now provides classrooms that can accommodate 2,235 students and offices for many departments, including English and textual studies, philosophy, and religion."