#contrast control

Yesterday evening (September 22, 2022), I made a few photos of Dublin’s LUAS trams using my Nikon Z6. It had been raining much of the day but about 6pm the sun came out, making for some interesting but high contrast scenes. Back in the old days I’d have worked with black & white film to make the most of this type of lighting, and controlled the contrast chemically. Now, I’m applying contrast…

Housatonic Railroad at Housatonic; an example of Contrast Control

June 10, 2016 was a perfect Spring day. Cool, clear, and sunny. I made a project of following the Housatonic Railroad’s line up its namesake valley from Canaan, Connecticut toward Pittsfield. Over the years I’d explored parts of this line, but never put all the pieces together. So, with the northward freight on its way, and fellow photographer Paul Goewey in the navigator’s seat, I arrived at…

Irish Rail ICR’s with a pastel sky at Kildare.

Irish Rail Intercity Railcars work downroad (away from Dublin) at Kildare. To make the most of this scene I needed to make some global (overall) and localized contrast adjustments in Lightroom. This was necessary to compensate for the contrast characteristics inherent to the digital file produced by my FujiFilm X-T1. I worked with the RAW file which has substantially more data than the in-camera…

Narrow Gauge Rack; Contrast in the Alps.

  Below are two versions of an image I made of a Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn narrow-gauge train engaging the Abt rack system on its steep ascent from Göschenen to Andermatt. These were made with my FujiFilm X-T1 digital camera on my visit to the Alps with Stephen Hirsch, Gerry Conmy and Denis McCabe in mid April 2016. The first is the unadjusted (except for scaling) Jpg produced in camera. Notice…