Year In Pictures: 2010/07/06
Jul. 6th, 2010 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqThe St Lawrence & Hudson Railway was the brainchild of senior managers who are a long time gone from our company. The idea was to split our eastern operations into their own, independent operating unit so that they could be run more efficiently. Everyone knew that they were just packaging them up into a saleable size so that they could dump the money-losing eastern corridors and keep the lucrative bulk business in the west. A brew of union agreements and regulatory roadblocks eventually led them to scrap the initiative before it entirely got off the ground. Now the eastern corridors make pretty good money with all the merchandise and container traffic that we move over them, so maybe it's just as well that the StL&H was stillborn.
All that remains are a few trinkets like this one, which was given to me by a former manager of this short-lived venture when he was cleaning out his office before heading off to work a stint in up-state New York. (He's still with the company, he was just going to manage an office down there for awhile.)
This is one of those rare pictures that I shot on (mostly) automatic. I set the ISO to 100 and let the camera pick the rest. I did this because I could not get a good angle to see through the view finder to set it myself. I sat the camera on the table, set it's self-timer and then flashed a laser pointer through the glass block while it counted down. It took a couple of tries because I was aiming it blind, and it kept focusing on everything but the intended target (apparently the wall behind it is a very tempting target for auto-focus). I eventually tricked it into focusing on the right thing by putting my hand in the frame beside the block so that it knew roughly where to focus.
The camera chose f/1.8 (no surprise) and .7 seconds. I'd have set a higher f/stop and longer shutter, but I wasn't in control this time. And in retrospect, I think the camera chose more wisely than I would have. I like the way it blew out the background details. I did a bit of cropping, and boosted the contrast and saturation a bit in software once I pulled the image from the camera.
All that remains are a few trinkets like this one, which was given to me by a former manager of this short-lived venture when he was cleaning out his office before heading off to work a stint in up-state New York. (He's still with the company, he was just going to manage an office down there for awhile.)
This is one of those rare pictures that I shot on (mostly) automatic. I set the ISO to 100 and let the camera pick the rest. I did this because I could not get a good angle to see through the view finder to set it myself. I sat the camera on the table, set it's self-timer and then flashed a laser pointer through the glass block while it counted down. It took a couple of tries because I was aiming it blind, and it kept focusing on everything but the intended target (apparently the wall behind it is a very tempting target for auto-focus). I eventually tricked it into focusing on the right thing by putting my hand in the frame beside the block so that it knew roughly where to focus.
The camera chose f/1.8 (no surprise) and .7 seconds. I'd have set a higher f/stop and longer shutter, but I wasn't in control this time. And in retrospect, I think the camera chose more wisely than I would have. I like the way it blew out the background details. I did a bit of cropping, and boosted the contrast and saturation a bit in software once I pulled the image from the camera.
