Love this web site for photos Cough cough

Oh Dear Lord that's disgusting.  Nothing but dollars signs going up in the air!!  I love good steam loco photos but this just baffles me.  I wonder if this is pic is from a trip when she nearly ran out of fuel?  I know she is oil fired but what happened to the concept of light, bright, and even in the firebox?

Did you read the caption?  It was a photo runby during a National Railway Historical Society convention.  The fireman was making all of that smoke entirely on purpose for the photographers.

 

Ah yes, reading and comprehension.

Seems efficent enough to me. I wish we had more smoke and smog producing machines and factories here.

Lol. Cool photo, Phill!

If you try to submit stuff, you won't love it for long.

They really only want the 3/4 shots with strong sunlight. They pretty much turn down the majority of photos submitted to them. They also apparently will deny everything by specific people. I know a guy who submitted some O Winston Link and Steinheimer photos out of frustration for having everything he submitted turned down. They were also turned down, but not because they weren't his, they cited all kinds of technical problems with them which were unacceptable to them.

I quit trying to submit as 100% of the photos I tried were turned down.

Talk about air pollution. It would never pass an emissions test.

Dont be upset, use their REJECTED notice as constructive criticism and take better pictures, your sure to be the next Picasso, just with a camera.


       

Ditto!

I take great photos, and I have been published lots of times.

I know guys who regularly get published in Trains and Railfan and they tell me they often get rejected as well. One pal of mine got one rejected from that site which was good enough for the cover of Trains magazine that same month!

No, we're dealing with what I can only imagine to be morbidly overweight, middle-aged white guys who probably know Star Trek episodes by stardates, have never kissed a girl ever and love living in their 'big fish- little pond' world.

I realized it's not worth my time to bother with them once I realized what their MO is.

 I'm assuming the statement "They really only want the 3/4 shots with strong sunlight." is just sort of exaggeration for effect.  It is true that they turn down a lot (my understanding is that only 20-30% of the offerings get accepted) and it is true there are a lot of 3/4 wedgies and it is true that I have been turned down more times than I can remember....however, I have a lot of accepted pictures on the site that don't meet the above criteria....  for example

 

 

http://www.railpictures.net/vi...id=527845&nseq=2

 

http://www.railpictures.net/vi...d=463522&nseq=18

 

http://www.railpictures.net/vi...d=414988&nseq=28

 

etc.

 

 

The main reason that I have never submitted anything to that site, back when I used to shoot 35MM color slides and medium format B&W film. Plus, I never visit that site anyway, as everything is way too "sanitary". And, yes I have had stuff published in a number of magazines as well as books, that would never have been accepted by that site.

Did they have those back in '82 when the photo was taken?

Yes, there was "exhaust emission" regulations for railroads back then, but steam locomotives have always been exempt, even in California, being that they are historic pieces of equipment.

By that reasoning, if I submit 10, 2 or 3 should be accepted, but I'm not seeing that happen. Maybe I'm just a crappy photographer. I don't see a problem with this one...

 

 

I did manage to get 4 accepted years ago.

I would bet you'd get further than many of us if you can somehow establish who you are. I know people who get a really high percentage of their stuff accepted there and their work isn't any better than those who get rejected all the time. I fully believe that if you have the 'secret handshake,' you're likely to get in more often. I'd think if they knew who you were, you'd have greater success than the very same photos with a name they don't recognize.

Also, do you know how to speak Klingon? If so, I'd bet that would help, too!

Ummmmmm   no. A 20-30% acceptance rate for the site is the overall acceptance rate applied to the entire lot of submitted photographs not the acceptance rate for an individual photographer.  Within that entire group the rejection rate for a single photographer could easily be 100%.

 

  As for the example picture - my guess would be "distracting foreground shadow".

 

You could probably make the same statement about the photos that appear in the magazines - far more submitted than published, and some photographers not published at all.

 

My experience has been just the  opposite of p51's - every photo I've submitted has been accepted, including a few I was sure would be rejected.

 

One was rejected for beeing too noisy - I learned a bit about noise reduction, re-edited it, and it was accepted the next day.

 

And none of them have been '3/4 shots with strong sunlight' - I consciously avoided submitting that type of photo, and 40% of my submissions are 'cloudy day' shots.

 

A quick tour through the various "***'s Choice" categories show an amazing variety of perspectives, many of which deserve the ultimate compliment ("I wish I'd taken that shot!").

 

http://www.railpictures.net/johnacraft/

 

And RP is incredibly helpful when preparing for a trip - I can quickly get a feel for photo locations on a particular line, and save a LOT of time scouting a particular line.

 

But to each his own.

Phill's picture of 844 brings to mind Cotton Belt 4-8-4 #819 running south from Dupo back to AR, following the 1990 NRHS St. Louis National Convention. 819 belched black smoke the entire trip - - something wrong with the firing valve or a green fireman, or?

Actually I pulled it up on a mobile device and no, I did not see a caption, so thank you for your presumption of my comprehensive abilities.  Beyond that I still don't understand wasting that much fuel/making that big of a mess. 

Not the firing valve, nor a "green Fireman", the "or?" was actually the old head Engineer that simply didn't know how to properly operate a modern, high horsepower steam locomotive. The Engineer had the valve gear hooked up WAY TOO far, for such a light load at 60 to 70 MPH, thus the Fireman had insufficient draft and had to have the blower turned wide open plus very high atomizer (they had to force the fire so hard, they eventually set fire to the bottom of the cab floor).

Then how about in the future you try ASKING, why was the locomotive producing such huge clouds of black smoke? There MUST have been some reason for it, i.e. bad fuel, leaking superheater unit, inexperienced Engineer/Fireman, or simply a photo run-by (the photographers sometimes actually request that much smoke).

That is a great site for photos, but I agree they can be tough to get on. There is another site that is easier, and also has a model train section!  Lots of O gauge

here:

I likely didn't ask because I been a steam locomotive fireman and know the various causes for that much smoke reasonably well.  I also know that it is usually done on purpose for photographs, and yet it is still a waste of fuel, as well as fodder for those would like to see anything that makes visible emissions retired to the scrap heap.  But once again presumptions of my comprehension of what I see in the photograph are greatly appreciated.  

That was my point. I know numerous people, some of which like you have almost everything accepted who are convinced once a specific name gets associated as worthy of the 'secret handshake', most of their stuff gets in, regardless.

I knew a guy who submitted one shot through a pal of his and it got shot down. He took it the next day with his name, and it went right in (along with all of his other shots). He, too, wondered why some of his photos got accepted especially when he sees the stuff that doesn't make it. He's the one who pointed this out to me and now I'm 100% convinced that they're far more likely to let a specific shot in based onwho shot it and not what the photo looks like.

And did your friend call them on it and tell them about the initial submission being under a friend's name?  And then ask for an explanation?  To me he had them nailed dead to rights on picking favorites.

Nah, he was testing his theory.

Smoke Em if ya got em! I'd like to see someone standing on an overpass with this going by, like the recent video of the 611!

Don

  I'm afraid the fact of the single reject/accept on a single picture means nothing.  You are assuming a number of things not the least of which are no test-to-test variation and same screener viewing the same image at two different times.  Screener-to-screener variation is a fact of life and is to be expected and screeners do change off during the day and across days.

 

  If your friend wants to run a meaningful test he would have to do something like the following:

 

  Your friend takes 35 of his shots and 35 of his pal's shots. They get someone who knows something about photography and composition to look them over (the rater has to be blinded to who took what) and render a judgement with respect to photographic equality across the 70 pictures.  If they pass that judgement call they would then take the 70 pictures, line them up in sequence and use a random number table from 1-70 to assign a number to each picture.  Reorder the pictures according to their random number (again 1-70) and put 1-35 in one pile and 36-70 in the other. Your friend takes one pile and his pal takes the other and then they get a random number table to determine the order in which the two of them will submit pictures to the site. They agree in advance that the pictures will only be submitted once and they agree to a total submission rate of 10 pictures per day spread over a 24 hour period. After 7 days they can use standard statistical methods to test for a significant difference in pass/fail proportions of your friend pictures submitted by his pal and his pal's pictures submitted by him and see what they see.  Odds are - not much.

 

 

There are a number of venues to post your images. I have not tried railpictures.net.

 

I post mine on RRpicturearchives.net  and here OGR Forum, mostly on the Real Trains, Midweek Photos, on Wednesdays.

   

On rrpicturearchives.net, You will see anything that anyone posts. I sometimes wonder why they post cloudy day images of freight cars. But then I don't have an interest in those types images, but I do look through a number of things that I never thought I would, someone post images from Poland and another from a narrow gauge operation in Brazil that I find real interesting. Plus all the old 1940-1960 images of fallen flags.

 

Mine are here:

 

http://dieseldan1954.rrpicturearchives.net/

 

To each his own, but don't feel bad if this site or that magazine does not accept a submission. I feel I am just putting mine out there to share with anyone who has an interest.

 

Dan

They always have high quality stuff on their website, and it never truly bothered me when a photo got rejected (sometimes if you submit them a few weeks later, they get accepted). My problem is that lately they tell me the photos I submit are too big of a file. They want high quality, but not big files? I don't get that one. Oh well, I'll figure it out eventually.

While I don't have anything to do with rail pictures.net, I'm a white guy and would appreciate your reconsidering such broad generalizations in the future.  Thank you.

Demographically, I stand firm with my assumption, which was much longer than you quoted, though.