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Hi everyone,
This month got off to a decent start! Could not resist the nice weather and the possibility of catching the new "genset" 3GS21B's (1220 and 1221) reported to be in town. Sure enough, I did see both in BNSF' North Yard in Fort Worth, TX but they were not parked in a photogenic location. Nevertheless, I did score something else new and exciting, ES44AC #6163. As luck would have it, I don't see a BNSF SD9 6163 in my roster, so I don't have to worry about the 6163:1 and 6163:2 notation in this case. I chased this two month old across town to get another 200mm tele of the builder plate sticker for that all important serial number and builder date. One other thing I should mention is that these are the first photos I am posting from a used Nikon D50 I scored for $400. My Kodak DCS 760 ($2600 used in 2003) was becoming problematic by December, 2006. I'll admit that dropping it in late November didn't help (forgot to zip bag, lens was destroyed). With only a few days before a trip to Arizona for Christmas, I decided to pick up the D50 as a backup. The Kodak worked for the most part during the trip (see January 2007) but when the battery died once on the Kodak, I gave this far less expensive camera a try, and I was beyond impressed and downright shocked (in a good way) to find out that for high volume shooting of trains in daylight conditions, this Nikon D50 is every bit as good as the Kodak DCS 760. Other than having to settle for ISO 200 vs. 100. For the record, all five of these photos were taken RAW, converted to TIFF in Nikon's lousy Capture Editor software, cropped, unsharp masked, and posted. No color tweaks at all. A few could use a little tweaking, but obviously I consider them usable. Enjoy! |
