So over the weekend, the combination of nice weather and steam trains running on the Worth Valley tempted me (Ben) out to the lineside with the camera. The railway have started running their Santa Special trains, hence why "Big Jim" is covered with tinsel in the shot. I'll do a bit more in a separate post, but anyway the pic was published online on the Railway Centre website in their 'Pic of the Day' feature. I've had a few pics published online this way over the years; OK you don't get paid a fee for it, but it doesn't matter to me- I take these pictures because I like taking the pictures, and all they'd otherwise do is clutter up the hard drive. The link is here, to the index of pics for November:
http://www.railway-centre.com/november-2016.html
It did get me thinking about doing a blog post though. We both do a lot of railway photography, myself especially. Mainly because it is nice to be able to do something with the resulting images, we send the better ones off to the railway magazines, but our work tends in a lot of cases to be a bit on the abstract side for the tastes of most editors. Plus there always seems to be a few very prolific photographers who get the best locations and tend to get printed more often, so we don't get a vast amount of work published in the traditional 'print' mags against such competition.
That being said, last week we happily received the news that I (Ben) had five of my images published in 'Railways Illustrated' over the last 12 months. I'd spotted three of them, but typically the issues where two of the others had been featured had, by the process of Sods Law, come out at a point where I'd missed looking.
'Railways Illustrated' was the mag which published my first ever photo, this shot of a Deltic on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway; establishing the usual 'form' of my pics, I took this low-angle shot hanging out of a tree halfway along a badly overgrown footpath to nowhere. It was an amazing feeling to see one of my pics actually in print in a mainstream magazine, and since then, it is the publication with which I've had the most success since.
So what have we got in this recent batch? Well first up is this shot from Hirst Wood, in Bingley (November 2015 issue)- I was on a walk out with The Childs in 2015 and was in the right place at the right time; I've only ever seen a couple of other photographers knocking around this location, so I tend to get it pretty much to myself when I want to, but with the Settle-Carlisle shut to through-traffic at the moment due to a landslide there isn't a lot worth photographing right now.
Moving on, to my slight surprise we have a shot from the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (June 2016 issue). Surprising because it is abstract, and a lot of the magazines don't really go in for this sort of thing, Surprising secondly because the Worth Valley has a dedicated band of established photographers who seem to be there all the time, and would appear to have the market in these pics pretty much sewn up. Certainly since the Deltic shot I've not managed a KWVR pic in print, and on the rare occasions where I've managed to find some unusual locations on the railway and have had pics published online, these new spots tend to get a ton of photographers any following gala. At least two I've spoken to have commented that they saw the locations in my pics and thought they'd have a go, which is a tad annoying but then this is a five-mile railway with limited pubic access, and which has been open since the 1960's, so its hardly surprising every angle has been found and staked-out by the veterans. So it was nice to see that my lazy (in that it was shot very close to home) shot of my favourite loco, "Big Jim" got into print.
I've already put about this on the Facebook page, but here we are with a shot from the Aln Valley Railway taken over the summer (published in the October 2016 issue)- I was a little surprised at this one getting in; the subject matter is a tad unusual (the railway station is a marvelous new-build on a brownfield site, and the loco is an industrial shunter which is a copy of a 'mainline' class, so unusual enough to attract the interest of the mags), but this was the most bog-standard of the angles I took all day, and was just a snap I thought I'd include for the sake of it, not an image I was particularly in love with.
Fast forward a bit, and this month I managed to get two shots from the Middleton Railway Diesel Gala into print too (in the December 2016 issue). A 'standard' shot of the LMS Diesel shunter "John Alcock" parked up at Middleton...
...and a ridiculously low-angle shot taken near Park Halt. A few of my fellow photographer friends like to comment that I take angles which are far too low, so it was pleasant to see that they'd used this one. Worth repeating that this wasn't a trespass shot- the line is unfenced, tramway-style, at this location, and I was safely out of the movement-envelope of the passing train.
Another thing worth mentioning is the choice in photographs- I sent them in to the mags, in amongst larger batches of images, but none of the shots were my own favourites from each of the days, and in fact were all shots I wasn't that sure about... which just goes to prove how tricky it is trying to guess what the editors will like or not. I'm grateful certainly to have them in print though, and will keep sending in pics on the off chance.
Finally, getting pics in print is nice (as it comes with financial reward) but I mainly send them off to an online mag, Railtalk, the editor of which I've known for a few years. A lot of photographers send in their images; I'm happy to get the pics seen here than just cluttering up my computer, and the team behind Railtalk put a lot of effort into getting the work out there. We have some pics in this months, and its free to view if anyone is interested:
http://www.railtalk.org/
Next time, either Birmingham, or some info on a commissioned shoot at City Hall in Bradford...
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