[PRCo] Re: Kodak

[Fred Schneider]

STRANGE THAT A DYED IN THE WOOL RAILFAN WOULD AGREE WITH ME ON  
THAT.   I have long believed that we need to clean up photographs and  
that sometimes art is more important than what the camera saw.   I  
think I just heard you agree with me.

I forwarded your compliment to John Bromley.

About two-third of the pictures that went into the two PCC books were  
retouched.   Interurbans Press did not do it.   I did it.    Some  
things were obvious and had to be done ... removing dust specs and  
scratches come under the category of it simply needs to be done to  
make a decent book.   Then there are those pictures where the sky was  
purely white and I air brushed it to a light gray so that it didn't  
bleed off onto the page.   But there were a few others I changed for  
artistic sake ... a Philadelphia scene where I picked up all the  
trash on the street 40 years later.   And a contact print of an  
LARailway P class car where I air-brushed all the span wire shadows  
off the side of the car ... they offended me.   And then there was  
the picture of the Toronto car crossing the old bridge at over the  
CNR at King, Queen and Roncesvalles ... I removed the power lines and  
feeder cables that crossed the car and rebuilt the car under the  
wires.   Oh yes, you remember the picture of the PST Brilliner going  
under the Pennsy at Aldan with the Silverliner overhead ... it's a  
fake ... the caption reads that the passengers on the Silverliner got  
downtown first ... they did because the Silverliner went through  
there 15 minutes before the Brilliner ... it was put together from  
two negatives.

If you go back to some of the Headlights issues that I edited, you  
will find a picture of the same PAT car passing itself in South Hills  
Yard.

Jim, I carried my interest in art as an elective in high school right  
through 12th grade.   I considered photography as a career but wound  
up going to college instead and working in labor statistics.   But I  
still enjoy spending a day in an art museum.   And I've been known to  
spend an afternoon in the south of France trying to find a mountain  
that Claude Monet painted centuries ago so that I could photograph  
the same white mountain.  It has taken me a long time to come to  
terms with the impressionist painters; I must prefer realist artists  
like the John Constable who worked in England in the 18th century.

How does this relate to railroading?   Well, I have long admired the  
likes of Philip Hastings, Dick Steinheimer, Ted Benson and my long  
time friend Bill Middleton ... people who carried artistic  
sensibilities into their railway pictures.   I've long believed that  
photo journalists did a better job taking pictures of our quarry than  
we did because they didn't approach the subject with preconceived  
notions of how an engine or a trolley had to be photographed.   No  
one told them the rods had to be down or the doors had to be closed  
or people couldn't be in the picture.

On Nov 3, 2007, at 3:30 PM, Jim Holland wrote:

> John Bromley is an Extremely Gifted // Highly Talented individual when
> it comes to Computers / PhotoShop / Digital Images    ----    he is
> obviously naturally artistic and does far more than produce marvelous
> results  --  his results could be called Miraculous~!~!~!~!     It  
> would
> seem he missed his calling and could have profoundly altered the
> photographic world had he pursued that career~!~!~!
>
>
>
>
> Fred Schneider wrote:
>
>> I need to acknowledge that the quality built into some of those ink
>> jet printers today is marvelous. You can do wonders in Photo Shop to
>> clean up old images. Over the last year our former list member John
>> Bromley has given me hundreds of prints he made from new digital
>> images, as well as faded, scratched and dirty color slides and color
>> negatives which he worked on in Photo Shop to produce absolutely
>> stunning visuals. The nice thing about Photo Shop is that John has
>> also become quite adept at cleaning up distracting elements in
>> pictures in minutes that used to take me forever with a paint  
>> brush or
>> an air brush. If a utility pole is in the wrong place or an  
>> automobile
>> is clearly distracting and ruins the composition of a picture, John
>> has become quite good at removing it and cloning the background over
>> it in minutes. This technique is also good if the photographer wasn't
>> holding the camera level and you need to straighten the picture and
>> rebuild part of a building. I also remember one picture where the  
>> film
>> tape fell off in a camera and wiped out a group of trees in a  
>> scene on
>> top of Mount Royal in Montreal ... John rebuilt the trees simply by
>> cloning other nearby trees. That is a skill that is possible in Photo
>> Shop that you could have never done properly with art colors and a
>> paint brush.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
>>> .
>>> .
>>> Jim Holland
>>> .
>>> Studying Pittsburgh Railways Company (PRCo)
>>> .
>>> ..............................From 1930 -- 1950
>>> .
>>> Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (PTM)
>>> .
>>> http://www.pa-trolley.org/
>>> .
>>> N.M.R.A.
>>> .
>>> http://www.nmra.org/
>>>
>