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Terminal Station

Posted by
Darkelf Photography (Perth, Australia) on 21 October 2022 in Transportation.

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Another bonus photo today. This week's prompt made me look through my archives for photos of abandoned vehicles, trains and buildings. I have quite a collection of them but because I decided to concentrate on my landscape photography, I have not published them anywhere just yet. I like the idea of the weekly prompt because it can motivate one to either get out there and take new photos or (in my case) to dig up older photos and have a go at processing them.

This photo comes from a place known as 'Locomotive Cemetery' located in the city of Łódź in Poland. It is a kind of storage place for old locomotives which are unlikely ever to return to services. It is essentially a graveyard and a dumping ground. I was lucky enough to visit this spot with my cousin in 2019. It is not exactly a place where anyone is free to enter so please excuse my trespassing activities but we do what we can to get a good photo, within boundaries of course. I am not sure if this place still has all the locomotives there now as I heard a few people commenting that a lot of them have been taken away to be trashed. It could be true or it could be just an urban rumour. Who knows? In any case, we were able to spend a little bit of time there and I took a number of photos which I have kept on my computer until now.

I chose this photo to post because I liked the overall composition with the tracks leading up to the main locomotive and it is nicely flanked by other locos to the right and another track and trees to the left. It also has enough of the gritty detail without overwhelming the viewer. You can see that the rail infrastructure and the vehicles have seen better days. It was late afternoon on a late autumn day with the light and conditions creating a great mood for photography. I was glad there were some clouds around as well and they added enough texture to the sky to keep it interesting. There was also a hint of autumn colours in the trees and I liked how they added a touch of something brighter to this moody scene.

I allowed myself a lot of creative freedom when processing this image. I worked on a number of different versions, from high contrast takes to more subtle ones with various colour grading themes applied to see to what worked best for my vision. I could have gone either with a harsher almost HDR type look or more subtle and restrained atmosphere. It was the latter that won me over in the end. I chose subdued green tonality because the original colour of the locomotives was dark green and it seemed natural to push the scene a little further in that direction. Another obvious consideration was to go black and white but it just did not work for me and I decided to stay with colour. Once I settled on the theme, I then worked a little bit with dodging and burning to build on the mood and depth in the scene. I do love a photo with rail tracks leading in and that was another reason why it was easy to pick this image to post. One last thing that I always add to my photos is a vignette effect and its strength and application varies from image to image. I do love its effect though to complete my work. I use it in a subtle way but it does add that something to the end result almost every time.

Hopefully you will like this different expression to my usual landscape work. I do love all kinds of photography and I am never closed to trying something new and different when an opportunity arises. As much as I love landscape photography, I could easily find myself taking urbex type of images because they present so many different opportunities. Different tones, moods and detail are just waiting to be explored. That is not unlike in landscapes, but they are all so different, almost always darker and with definite starkness to them. The abandoned look and feel certainly have a photographic attraction about them. While there is plenty to be discovered in urbex environments, it can also be very risky though, in terms of both, physical danger and legality, so it is worth keeping that in mind and treading very carefully is similar places.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV 1/25 second F/4.0 ISO 400 105 mm

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