Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?

I hadn’t been to Beecher, IL in quite a while, so I figured last night would be a perfect opportunity. It wasn’t too cold, and I had a free moment. You can probably see previous attempts at photography in the town of Beecher in this here blog, and over on my Flickr. I’m not sure why I’ve become obsessed with this town, but I know there’s a good photo here somewhere. Last night, I think I got a little closer to finding it.

I’d tried something similar to this before, but from farther up the hill, and closer to the sidewalk. Tonight, I took a lesson from the Beatles, and said why not do it in the road? Uh, not in that sense…wait…I mean…I put the camera in the middle of the street, and hoped a car wouldn’t run it over. See for your self:

Northbound CSX train Q120 cuts through the silence of downtown Beecher on a rainy Sunday evening, rolling hundreds of intermodal containers from Jacksonville, FL towards the ramp in Chicago.

What you see above is actually two photos merged together in Photoshop. I had to do that out of necessity, since I only have so many strobes. One of these days, I’ll have enough to light up an entire scene such as this, but not today. Therefore, it involves setting two strobes up on the grade crossing, lighting the train, then moving them around to light the tree, street and house in another frame. Toss the whole thing into Photoshop and viola, it looks like I’ve got four strobes.

And if you’ve seen Avatar, you may see similarities to the 3-D effects in there and this photo, at least I do. Of course, this isn’t nearly as cool, and the streets of Beecher don’t light up when you step on them, unfortunately. But, the forced perspective brought on by a low aperture, causing the tree and house to be out of focus, but the train to be sharp, almost reminds me of how they did some of the 3-D effects in the movie. It seemed to me that they just forced the perspective a little bit more to give it that look. Very cool stuff, and I’d recommend that movie just for the graphics, even if the plot is a bit formulaic.

Until later, NLS

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