While waiting a long time for a train to come by near Barstow, California, I wandered around and looked down the tracks. I imagine this is similar what train engineers must see when they are out in wide open spaces…long and endless track.
My goal was to convey how the tracks go on and on and on, maybe almost boring or uninteresting as they go almost endlessly into the distance, which many times has beautiful vistas.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
I like the symmetry, and I cropped to get the rails hitting the corners in the same place.
What I don’t like is that although I tried to be as steady as possible, and I focused straight ahead about a third of the way in, the gravel still doesn’t look tack sharp. I must have moved a little. Wish I had used a tripod. How would you have handled focus? Stack? Different focal point?
I spent a LOT of time trying to bring out the textures and different shades of black, white, and gray. I used the Lightroom B&W 07 filter to help.
Technical Details
Handheld. 70mm on a crop camera (105mm equivalent), f/13, 1/320 second, ISO 100.
Hi Mark,
that looks great. I love how the rails disappear into the distant background. There are beautiful textures everywhere.
The symmetry is really great with the rails, the antennas, the mountains in the distance, and the rocky hills on both edges. A small detail that seems to disturb this symmetry is the bush on the right side at the edge of the frame. Maybe you could crop the image a bit more to get rid of those bushes but keep the symmetry.
The gravel in the foreground looks nice and sharp to me. I can’t see any blur in this downsized version of the image. With your chosen shutter speed, I also find it hard to imagine that this is motion blur that you see in your original image.
When I want my foreground nice and sharp, I try to remember to check the focus in the display when I’m still in the field. And if it is not as desired, then I take another shot with the focus on the foreground for safety. But I also forget that sometimes and then get annoyed at home about a slightly blurred foreground.
I had also been playing around with the concept of “hyperfocal distance”. The aim is to achieve acceptable sharpness throughout the image. But what can be considered “acceptable” is probably again a matter of taste. I was not satisfied with the results in my images. In addition, it is still somewhat complicated.
Since I have Topaz Labs Sharpen AI, I can also get back some missing sharpness in post-processing.
So to sum it up, this is a great picture with nice textures. I can’t see any blurred gravel. Well done!
Mark, the texture in the gravel and the long stretch of rails leading into the distance look good. The b&w treatment works well. The luminosity of the distant peaks gives a nice pull into the distance. However, this view is a heavy on the non-nature aspects, so I’m moving it to non-nature.
I’ve traveled through Barstow and Mojavi on I-40 a few times but I never had any thoughts of wanting to live there, especially in the summer months
I’m a whimp, I can’t take the heat!
Anyway, this is a great symmetry composition! It also shows the vastness of that area very well and my memories of it adds to that.
I think the sharpness of the gravel is quite good. It doesn’t start losing sharpness until it reaches the road crossing, then it appears to have that classic “heat mirage” effect making the tracks almost disappear but that has nothing to do with your focus. I think the depth of focus is really good, it’s right where it should be in my opinion.
The mountains still look as sharp as we would want them to be.
You may have been able to bump the shutter speed up by one stop making the ISO jump to 200, the added noise would have been virtually un-noticeable with such a good exposure IMO.
Thank you everyone. I appreciate your feedback about focus techniques and options here. I may have gone overboard with pixel peeping. I was zooming in at least 200%. @Jens_Ober, I had wondered about that bush on the right edge. In keeping with the symmetry I’ve removed it (see revision next to original) @Mark_Seaver , sorry about that! My memory was that any “regular” category was allowed in Weekly Challenge, but I looked at the guidelines again and sure enough “Non-Nature” is excluded. As an aside, I think it’s interesting that although the tracks comprise what seems like a minority of total pixels or frame area, their visual weight is very heavy. Anyway, lesson learned.
