Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily photos of Minneapolis. Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains composition and techniques.

Just another stop on the way, the Bunge Grain Elevator sits quietly abandoned on the west end of the Union yards by the University. You can actually see it from 35W, but not many people are seeing it now. It’s visible from the stretch of 35W just north of the missing bridge. This is also the place where I had my near run-in with a train.

The Winter Carnival starts tomorrow, but the hunt for the medallion has already begun. On top of building ice sculptures, skating and general winter fun; the powers that be hide a medallion somewhere in St. Paul and then give clues in lyrical form in the local paper. The one who finds it enters local legend and wins a big prize. I’m still fuzzy on the details, maybe Kate can help me with the details. One element I love is that the clues come out at half-past midnight, so the locals are out digging up the parks in the middle of the night. Gotta be hard-core to play. If you have any details or links to share, please comment!

This photo has a lot of angles. The composition is relatively static, but the tracks, trees and the silos are at angles. Another element I enjoy is how everything is mostly white. It seems like a black and white picture, but it’s not. I’ve done this before here and here. I warned you about it here. It also obeys the rule of thirds.

I’m headed over to St. Paul to find some images of the Carnival, so keep in touch to find out what we do around here to avoid cabin fever. Please feel free to comment some links to green things for me; I’m starting to crack. If I can just make it through February…

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily Minneapolis Photography. Minneapolis Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains photography, composition and photo techniques.

I took this picture when I was out shooting with my friend Larry. He showed me all the markings on the cars that tell where they were made and a lot of other interesting things. For example, this tanker was built in 1926. There’s a perk to bringing an industrial archaeologist with you. Seriously, that’s what he does. Check out his site — he has a totally awesome photography website - very clever sideways navigation on the galleries. If you like it, ask him who designed it for him. OK, okay, it was me.

I did a little post processing in Lightroom to boost the colors, sharpness, contrast and add the vignetting. Love that yellow crane.

Back to the Rails. Rail yards are such a great land of contrasts. There is so much activity, yet nobody is around. I am drawn to them by all the big equipment rolling around, but I’m nervous about either scary people or getting in trouble with the railroad bulls or simply getting killed. My only recent solution is to bring someone along to keep an eye on me.

This composition sets up a little tension in that the graffiti and the dark detailed rails are at the bottom left, yet the only place for your eye to escape is at the top where one can see just a little beyond the boxcar. I modified the image to sharpen the corrugation and introduce a stronger vertical effect to pull your eye out of the bottom of the image. The numerous diagonals also add dynamism to the image.

Often people (like my dad, sorry pop) center the subject, which leaves the eye sitting in the middle and getting bored. If you see something interesting, like the graffiti, look around it and find a near-by compliment. In this case it is simply the open space above the boxcar. The two spaces support each other as positive and negative. So next time you see something, look around it and find it’s frame — something bright needs a dark, something sharp needs a smooth. The word frame also hints to “frame of reference” so something to give scale or location helps, but put the two opposite each other in some way, not one surrounding the other. If I had pulled back and centered the graffiti, it would have been boring, just enough space above the boxcar is enough.

So what is the effect I’m applying to the image? It’s called Direct Positive. It’s mimicking the old photography developing technique. The effect is saturated colors, blown-out blues and wicked contrast. Now it can all be done in post with photoshop or lightroom. Lightroom actually has a preset for it and I use it to start from and then tweak it to match the image. I’ve done this before.

Let’s watch the comments and see if my dad catches the slight. Even better, maybe he’ll finally put a picture on flickr to prove me wrong.

A model train set? Nope, this is the North Yard of the BNSF Railroad that I visitied with Bob Kupbens on Saturday. What makes it “miniaturized” is a tilt-shift effect that makes the depth of field appear to be very shallow. Depth of field is the area that is in focus. This is determined by several factors: aperture, focal length and the distance to the subject. When the distance to the subject is as far away as these trains are, everything is in focus. The effect is normally only seen in close-up objects, like a small train set. That’s what makes this seem like it’s miniaturized.

How then did I get the effect on something this large? I could use a bellows camera and tilt-shift the lens, but there are several cool tools that allow you to do this with a 35mm SLR. But that’s not how I did it. The most powerful photography tool was easier to employ — Photoshop.

This weekend presented two different views on Minneapolis for me, Saturday was gray, cold and crappy, Sunday was sunny, warm and pleasant. On Saturday I went shooting with Bob Kupbens in North East Minneapolis. We also went to the Mpls Library Downtown. Sunday was a nice day for a walk around Lake of the Isles. The two days and pictures were a great contrast of the big city.

Minneapolis was built by the railroads. The odd layout of the town and the crooked streets make much more sense if you look at an old map of The Cites from the first part of the 20th century. The railroads all follow smooth and straight lines through the area and around the rivers. The city grew around them. But before the railroads, there were the lakes. Interstate 394 and Lake Street are the only ways though the chain of lakes for miles. The two forces of rail and lake have constricted the city and yet created it at the same time.

A gnarled tree growing on a rocky cliff is challenged by it’s environment, but it derives its character from this challenge. How have your challenges made you a better person? Take time on this veteran’s day to reflect on the challenges and be grateful for how they shape our character and make us stronger.

I have an unusual interest in intermodal shipping containers. A couple of years ago I started noticing these colorful boxes full of earthly delights. They are really an amazing concept when you stop to think about it: load them up in China, put them on a massive ship that’s in port only 24 hours, send them around the world, load them straight to a train, unload and then use as a warehouse for as long as needed and unload them once. Have you wondered why there are no large warehouses anymore? Yep, that’s why. Having grown up looking over the deep-sea port of Kenosha, I used to watch them unload ships for days. Longshoremen (who made $22/hour in the ’70s) loaded items by hand into seven-story deep ship holds. These ISO containers changed all of that.

As usual, when I make realizations like this I end up spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about it and then go risk my life for no reason.

The picture above was taken in the Union Yard in St. Paul. I wasn’t actually in the yard itself, I was on the miles of parallel track leading into the yard from the North. After shooting the massive Bungee grain elevator (elevators revolutionized the grain commodities market early in the 20th century, but that’s another article), I started walking the length of a parked train of TTX well cars. I walked in the snow for quite a while looking at the neighborhood and the graffiti. Then I came upon the image above. I shot over the parked empty TTX cars at a loaded double stack on the far side. I constructed an abstract image which, if I may say, came out pretty well. The contrast of saturated colors and detailed subjects is something I have been working on for a long time and the picture of Sarah at the State Fair Grounds is along the same idea.

After the shot, I decided that I could get a better one of the containers if I didn’t have the TTX cars in front of them. So I climbed up and over them. That was a lot of work, the ‘ladder’ was bent inward under the car and there were no handles on top. It took a while and the frozen steel was painful. (Have I mentioned how cold it gets up here in Minnesota?) When I landed on the other side I wasn’t going back.

I took a few shots which didn’t work because I couldn’t get back far enough, there was only one open track between the parked trains. So I started backtracking along the empty rail. As I walked, I looked up the track and saw in the distance another train coming. I thought I might get a good engine shot, but I was now on the wrong side of the parked train — there were six empty rail lines on the other side of the parked train and I was sure it was going to pass over there, but I wasn’t going over the parked train again. So I kept walking.

Turns out I wasn’t going to miss that train.

As I walked, I realized that that train was on the same line I was on. The parked trains on both sides of me were really long. It was 15 cars to the end between me and the oncoming train and much longer the other way. I started running. I ran and ran, counting the cars to the end as I went. It’s hard to run on frozen gravel. Eleven cars to go, ten…

Then the engineer started blasting the horn at me. Six cars, five… It became clear that I wasn’t going to make it. Now, if you haven’t spent much time in rail yards, and based on my lonely experiences there, not many of you have, the rail lines are really really close together. I decided that I had to do something, and climbing wasn’t a good idea, I could fall into the path of the oncoming train. So I jammed myself up against a hitch between the parked cars. Again, not safe, but better than standing in front of a moving train.

Amidst the blaring horn and the very angry glare of the engineer, the three BNSF EMD 60’s rumbled by and I could reach out and touch them. There was about eight inches between the trains. Time moves slowly when you are caught between trains.

Suffice to say I made it out alive and it was a nice walk back to the Jeep. The birds were singing, the snow had a lovely crunch to it, and now I had another rule to live by: don’t walk on single rails between parked trains.

Oh, another disclaimer, my friend Larry has since told me that in this post-9/11 world, walking on railroad property is a really bad idea. It seems that the good old days of railroad bulls beating hobos aren’t gone forever. So if my story has a romantic appeal to to you, stay out of rail yards and seek immediate help of a psychological nature.