Jaite Station - Rails On Fire

This past weekend Greg Daily and I headed out to Ohio to spend a couple days in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Local photographer Jerry Jelineks was kind enough to show us around the first night and next morning. After shooting a rather uneventful sunset and moonrise at Tinker’s Creek Preserve, I mentioned wishing for a place to go light painting. Jerry knew the spot. We rolled into Jaite around 10:00pm and got to work. Jaite was the location of a former textile mill. When researching the trip I thought the mill was still in existence and planned on doing some serious HDR photography. But a couple years ago the park service remediated the site, so no such luck.

The light painting above is a composite of 5 shots blended in Photoshop. I’m even in one of the shots, or more precisely, my shadow is. I found that trying to light paint multiple aspects of the composition adds complexity to the shoot. So for this shoot the first shot was 30 seconds and I just painted the railroad bed. The next 2 shots were of each railroad track. I increased the brightness of the light as I moved away from the camera. This helped provide a constant amount of light as I ran down the tracks. The 4th and 5th shot was of each building. After combining the images a few targeted adjustments were made.