It was some of the worst photo reproduction I've ever seen, too. Actually, it's an extreme case of what has been a long-running problem at R&R over the past few years. I've expressed this to them in the past, and have certainly exchanged a lot of emails with them over the past week. First, let me explain what's wrong with the photos, then I'll give a brief rundown as to why.

But before I do, I want to say right up front that I give R&R very high marks for laying out the article very nicely, giving each set of photos the space I had envisioned and for leaving the text about 99 percent as I submitted it. Unfortunately, this text was close to two years old. The revised text I emailed them over the summer never got used (even though the email itself was acknowledged). As a result, the references to CEFX SD90/43MACS and Soo Line power as being regular visitors to north Idaho are out-of-date. Still...they arranged the material very nicely and proved this piece could indeed fit nicely in eight pages.

Now, to the photos. There are varying degrees of magenta bias that simply wasn't there in my slides. And it wasn't limited to the Idaho photos. Look at Preston's cover shot. Plenty of magenta in the gray roof and fuel tank, in the track, etc. I was told Preston did his own scans, so I can't say for certain whether both scan jobs caused this, or some underlying problem with software or printing. There are areas of softness which, again, do not match my slides. Worst examples being the POVA shot on pages 36-37, the face of the approaching unit on page 37, and the 4955 on page 41. I'll cut them a little slack on the softness of the full-page image on page 39; that was taken from great distance with a 200mm in the very last (weak) moments of sunlight penetrating into that part of the canyon, with the sun shining from almost directly over my left shoulder, reflecting back from every dust particle in the half mile or so between me and the train. My slide on that one isn't tack sharp, but certainly better than how it printed.

But far and away the biggest problem was too much black ink. Shadow areas that contained plenty of detail on the slides plugged up solid black on the page. That bottom shot on page 38 actually shows the second unit, and the concrete tunnel portal, at least on my slide. And you should have been able to see all kinds of detail in the shaded sides of the grain trains on page 41, not just solid walls of black.

Back when I worked at R&R (1988-96), slides were taken up the road to a wonderful place equipped with several drum scanners. This was (and in many cases still is) the best way to get crisp, authentic-looking reproductions out of any transparency. But after the advent of fairly affordable consumer-grade and pro-sumer-grade tabletop scanners, many of the smaller publications switched to these as a cost-saving move. Most of the rail magazines really suffered with this at the beginning. Even at Trains there was a dramatic drop in the quality of color photo reproduction for a time, but they have mostly recovered from that.

R&R is still challenged by hardware, software, and proofing issues. It's not the fault of the editors. They are doing the best they can with the tools they're provided. I know Steve and Walt would love to farm out image scanning to a qualified vendor, and have color-calibrated monitors to preview everything on. If only the company would spend that kind of money.

For the past 13 years, I've been employed in the digital prepress department at one of the Northwest's largest heat-set web printers. I've learned a lot about what goes into putting ink on paper, and how to make it look like what you saw on the original photo, and what you saw on screen. You can get pretty spoiled proofing work on a 30-inch Apple Cinema display paired with a 24-inch AC display. And everyone I work with suffers from the same problem I do: when we're out on the town looking at books or magazines or any other printed material, we aren't just enjoying the content. We're checking it for manufacturing issues like color, density, registration, design, binding, etc.

As a result, I was probably more disappointed when I saw my published Idaho piece than anyone else will be. But after the initial shock, I've been able to appreciate the space and layout effort the boys put into it. Hopefully, I've raised the photo repro awareness with them enough this time that there'll be more attention put toward it in the future.

Now, I must get food and gear packed for a day in the fall colors with 4449. Better keep my eyes open for that rented gray Suburban everyone's talking about.