Six pages in R&R was not nearly enough room to say everything I would have liked to about Steinheimer. And not nearly enough to include some of the more interesting and off-the-wall images from among the 40 or so black & white prints I submitted. (Many of the photos they chose to run were the most ordinary and average ones of the bunch.) Oh well, it wasn't supposed to be about me anyway.

We remember Stein mostly for his black & white, but he had his share of terrific color work too. The handful of color shots in his "Mojave Crossing" article alone were daring and creative, really playing the shadow and light. A recent letter from Doug Harrop reminded me of Steinheimer's all-color story in Trains on SP's battle against the Great Salt Lake back in the late 1980s/early 90s, which had some of the best-looking color imagery anyone had seen in print in those days. Sharp, well-exposed, good tonal range for color, excellent color balance, good shadow detail.

One of the best articles on Steinheimer which few American fans ever got to see was in the Japanese magazine Train back around 1989-91. Umpteen pages of Steinheimer's photography, and just enough of the captions published in English to understand the gist of it all. Plus another umpteen pages of photos by Naotaka Hirota, who came to California to shoot in the footsteps of Steinheimer, the two of them working together in the field, Hirota's photos getting printed full-bleed one vertical to a page, or one horizontal across two pages, spread after spread like that. It was a terrific tribute to two of the most high-regarded train photographers we've ever seen.