CERM 5th Annual Night Photo Shoot

A few days old, but finally here it is. This past Saturday Bob LaMay & I put on the fifth annual Night Photo Shoot at the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum in Willimantic. Well, it almost didn’t happen because of the heavy thunderstorms that were rolling through the area on Saturday afternoon. But we did luck out, and the bad stuff held off from the Willimantic area. We had about 20 photographers of varying interests and skill sets down from New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. Jeez, if we only had someone from New Hampshire, we would have covered all of New England. There were digital shooters, slide shooters, and even one photog was shooting with a stereoscopic (2 lens) camera!

OK, on to the goods.

First off, a huge thanks to the volunteers at the CERM – and I do mean volunteers in every sense of the word since everyone at the museum does this for zero pay, just for the love of railroading – for everything that they did to prepare the site, not only for this event, but in general. Due to their efforts we not only had the village area to use for the night shoot, but also had an operating turntable and roundhouse with tracks into two bays! Second, a big thanks to good friend and fellow photographer Bob LaMay for helping out with the planning and idea stages of the shoot. Bob is where I draw great inspiration for the layouts I came up with for the shoot, and without him, it probably wouldn’t be as interesting. Also, a big thanks to Warren Riccitelli of NERCA (New England Rail Car Association) and NARCOA (North American Rail Car Operators Association) for bringing down his C&O Fairmont speeder so we could use it in the shoot. It did add a little spice to the usual CERM equipment lineup. And last, but certainly not least, a huge thanks to the guys with the Lumedynes. Fellow rail photographers Tom Mik (check out his site – link in the Blogroll to the left), Shaun McGinnis and Mike Peverett brought their lights down and literally lit up the night for the attendees. Without them, the shoot would have been rather dark. And of course, thank you to the photographers that came down despite the dreary weather forecasts and braved the rain with the rest of us.

Now for the imagery. Instead of going through each shot, I’ll just lay the cards on the table, so to speak. We did have to change plans mid-stream due to the way the weather was moving, but we did get in most of the shots I had planned, but in a different order.

OK, enough blabbing, here’s the pictures from the evening.  Just as a note, the first two and the 9th shots were taken with available light (no flash).

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Of course, as usual, feel free to comment either on a specific photo in the gallery, or here for general comments.

Thanks for looking!
Tom