Steaming into town on the White River and Northern

For me this remains one of the most successful images I'd taken during my color Polaroid pinhole photography period, although achieving the results shown above required some of the most extensive digital manipulation I've done on any image. For example, what looks like engine steam is actually lens flare; a subtle bit of blending around the smokestack perfected the illusion, disguising what would otherwise be a major flaw. Also, an experiment in creating the illusion of a sunset simply did not work, and so the entire sky background had to be digitally reworked.

There's a lot going in in this image. Look closely and you'll see a fireman stoking the Minitrix 0-6-0. Also, the locomotive sitting just to the left of the water tower is a Shay!

Image specs: Having multiple light sources, each with a different color temperature, a great deal of color correction had to be done, often in selected areas. Aside from a new sky and a light touch of steam, though, the modeling itself was not modified in any way.

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