Thanks Marty, Charles!

You are putting me in Pete Lerro's shoes, as it is usually myself gawking over the quality of
his shots and trying to figure out his secrets. Looks like my Canon proved itself worthy of shooting among Nikon D300's and such, lol.

Sure - I'll share.

Images taken with a Canon 7D. Assortment of lenses, am I the last not to shoot with an 18-200?
Most images were shot with Canon's 24-105 "L" lens, though I really like and often use Canon's 10-22 mm and 70-200 mm lenses. I had a Tameron 12-24, the 10-22 mm is, IMHO, much better and the extra 2 mm makes a world of difference.

Processing? What processing, lol. OK - I was after 3 looks, mostly I hoped to get a nostalgic look at the line, similar to photos I've seen from a well know photographer of the line, John West. Always admired his work along the narrow gauge, both past and present. That look was achieved (I think), using one of two methods. First and simplest, was simply desaturating the image. I found that lowering the vibrancy worked best. Another method was to layer a black and white over the color and blend the two. These scene worked best with contrasty images, verses over the shoulder lighting.

The second "look" I was after was straight B&W. The night shots were straight forward enough as Pete tends to backlight subjects where possible yielding a lot of contrast. For the daytime B&W, that was a bit trickier since we weren't able to shoot many shots when the light was low. I converted one image to B&W, then made a layer that was super contrasty, using Photoshop's "Equalize", and then layered it on top of the first image and again blended the two together. Gave the image just the right amount of punch.

Last were simply pretty pics of the line - gotta get those, right? Strangely not as easy as I had figured, again since getting a late start and missing some evening light in preparation for the night shoot. The shots in the yard were among my favorite - before the charter, while waiting, the light was great and shooting against the light yielded nicely contrasted images. A slight tweaking with Photoshop's shadow recovery tool helps bring out some detail in the darkest of spots (such as in between the crevices of the appliances on #487's nose and between the counterweights of the drivers). Later in the day - well, it's the Cumbres and Toltec, just point and shoot!

/Mitch