One of the hazards of shooting multi bracketed shots like I do for HDR images is that any movement between each shot introduces the chance for ghostly apparitions, especially with people and cars. Knowing this, I actually shot these seven shots with the intention of seeing how ghostly I could make the other museum visitors appear. When you look at some of these old trains and imagine all the hundreds of thousands of passengers many of them transported during their hay day, it isn’t hard to image there may be a few ghostly passengers still hanging around.
The E44 was an electric, rectifier-equipped locomotive built by GE for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) between 1960 and 1963. They survived through the PRR and its successors (Penn Central and Conrail) until Conrail abandoned its electric operations in the early 1980s. They were acquired by Amtrak and NJ Transit, where they lived short lives; all were retired by the mid-80s. Amtrak #502 (PRR & PC #4465) is preserved at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, restored to its PRR paint (Brunswick green with the PRR’s Keystone logo). The locomotive is 69 ft 6 in long, 10 feet wide and 15 feet tall. It weights in at 384,600 pounds. When it was in service it had a top speed of 70 MPH and had a power output capacity of 4,400 horsepower.
For more information on visiting the museum, visit their web site at www.rrmuseumpa.org/index.shtml.
I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames then combined into an HDR and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro with some extra work done in Topaz Adjust.
