Trains

I have been a railway buff all of my life.  As a small child, we "rode the rails" from Ohio to Delaware to visit family.  Later, my friends and I would ride our bicycles down to the Nickel Plate station in Rocky River to watch the 700-series steam engines thunder past.  Talk about awesome!

On a recent visit to Cleveland's Flats, I stumbled across the yard and roundhouse of the Midwest Railway Preservation Society, a place I had wanted to visit for some time but had never gotten around to.  Two members happened to be working there and invited me into the roundhouse to look around.  Wow!  To a train buff, it was hallowed ground.

These are just a few of the many photos I shot that day.  Hopefully there will be many more as I plan to return.  

 

The organization's website, which is under construction, may be viewed at the following link. http://www.midwestrailway.org/

Options

Digital has had a profound impact on photography, particularly with postproduction.  We have a multitude of options today that would have been unimaginable with film.  But that blessing comes with a price.  Sometimes all those options can be confusing.

A case in point for me is this infrared photograph I took of this young man walking down a desolate street on Cleveland's eastside with the city's skyline in the background.  I liked it but found the overhead wires to be distracting so I decided to take them out in Photoshop.  While I was doing that, I started to play around with the image and came up with these variations.

The problem is that I like all of the images and now I can't decide which one to use. I guess nobody ever told me photography would be easy.

Babcock State Park

I recently spent a week at Babcock State Park in West Virginia with my son and his family.  It's a place where we vacationed often when I was a kid, and it has changed surprisingly little over the years.  Talk about bringing back a flood of memories.  The highlight for me was climbing on the rocks in the stream with my nine year old granddaughter, Sami.  It was like I was a kid again, playing with a friend.

 

The Grist Mill wasn't there when I was a kid, but I love it anyway.  It is now the iconic image of Babcock. 

The mountain stream it's on feeds the old swimming area.  We used to sun ourselves on the large flat sloping rocks.

There is a small island in the old swimming area today, which I caught in the early morning light.

We stayed in adjacent log cabins, each surrounded by trees, on a hillside with the mountain stream close by.  My dad used to read stories of the frontier to my sister and me before we went to sleep at night when we were little.  It was easy to imagine wild Indians roaming about in the woods outside our cabin.

The only nearby store in the old days was in Clifftop, a couple of miles down the road.  The now abandoned building it still there.

I'll close with a photo of Sami.  What a wonderful gift to be able to share something with her that was so important to me when I was her age.