Further Up Dunes Junction

Earlier in November I was able to break away for some railfanning around Washington DC. My friend Daniel Speer accompanied me to several new-to-me photo spots around DC and Northern Virginia, and he proved to be an excellent guide to the area.

It was a great day of train watching with Daniel. Ever since moving out of the DC area five years ago, I’ve become acutely aware of my near total lack of real-life contact with railroads in the wild. The local short lines that work the elevators and stone industry in my new region of southern Delaware operate at a slow and irregular pace that doesn’t often result in sighting trains moving on tracks. Daniel knew excellent vantage points for capturing busy Washington-area train traffic in and around Union Station, the Tidal Basin/Waterfront area, and Neabsco Creek. Daniel timed our day to best leverage the low, early winter light.

My Washington rail fan excursion also afforded an opportunity to put my new Fujifilm X-E5 through its paces as a railfanning camera. One of Fujifilm’s differentiators in the current photography marketplace is its capability to produce excellent images straight out of the camera without any post editing. All of the photos here, except one, are presented Straight Out Of the Camera, or SOOC, with no Lightroom or Photoshop adjustments. The one photo here that did receive receive some editing attention was straightened and cropped, with no enhancements to exposure, highlights, shadows, or color.