Too crop or not to crop. I am making these decisions on the photos I am scanning all the time. When I first took the photos I often shot further back. Later, I thought of these photos as being flawed, as being too far away. Now, the loose cropping has provided something I had not thought of as being important then. That is, context.

Looking back on these photos I see them now as environmental portraits. The great photographer Brian Baer used to call environmental portraits of people, "mug shots with a wide angle lens." That's what these are, only with locomotives. They show the locomotive in it's world. They are kind of like static action shots.



Southern Pacific 2128 in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 1972. The Baldwin apparently brushed pretty close to something judging by the cab damage.



Southern Pacific 2128 in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 1972. The Baldwin isn’t the only thing historical in this photo. All the roadnames on the boxcars shown here are gone too.

Suggestions, comments and/or corrections are appreciated.

~Steve Sloan


- - - - - -

These photos are the most recent additions to my Train Website.

If you like the photos I have been posting I have many similar photos, very few of which have been published elsewhere. You can click on the links below to see more:

* Home Page of Website
* Southern Pacific Section
* My Train Photo Twitter Feed