Ryan's Journal

As I was coming back from a rather eventful photo shoot along part of the Charles (running into many of the guys I know who came through MIT around my time who are still doing graduate work), I crossed the railroad tracks on my way home and glanced at a train maybe seven blocks away - its velocity and distance made it difficult for me to tell which direction it was heading in, and I know trains go both ways across this intersection. I looked back a couple of times after passing before realizing it was indeed headed my way, and thought, "Gee, I wish I had my camera."

After the overly long in coming realization that I did have my camera, I had an overly long mental debate about whether to stop, yank out the camera and switch lenses and shoot. I sluggishly managed to pull off all three, though not exactly in that order. I have a couple of ill advised shots from a prime lens before I set to the surprisingly hard task of unmounting one and remounting another, substantially larger lens in the dark and cold. I did finally get to a point where I could safely snap off a couple photos, almost on the tracks, before the train actually arrived.

You may or may not be glad to know I didn't feel like getting run over by a train today, so there aren't any pictures dead-on of the approach - maybe if I'd had my telephoto lens in, the story would be a little different.

The worst thing is, while I was standing there fumbling with my lenses, some guy was standing on the other side of the track, with a sizable zoom, firing away. I should have just asked for a copy of his set.

I apologize for the low quality file format, I don't know how to control JPG quality output in iPhoto (I should probably export this as PNG instead, were I truly concerned about artifacting). Please believe me when I say it does look quite a bit better in original form.

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