Snoqualmie Depot in the Snow by David Irons Jr Via Flickr: www.davidrironsjrphotography.com Well winter has decided to make a quick comeback here in the Pacific Northwest today!. This is the beautifully restored depot for the Northern Pacific Railroad located in Snoqualmie, Washington. This historic depot is essentially ten minutes from my house and yes, this is the FIRST photo of it I have ever uploaded! I am very picky about certain locations and this is one of them. I have photos from all four seasons, but just never anything that really, I felt, was worthy of my awesome Flickr friends until now! I wish we would of had a little more snow coverage on the depot, but by parking myself in "The Bush" I was able to hide all of the footprints in the snow! Of course I also had to dodge the snow clumps that were bombarding me and my camera from above during all of this! This is by far, one of my favorite railroad depots because of the turret and fireplaces. Inside the depot is a little museum and gift shop. This is six, count em, exposures (-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3) merged and tonemapped in Photomatix. Normally I use three exposures, but the +2 was not enough to get into the dark shadows on the building, so I went higher. My camera only brackets three shots at a time, so I had to fire the first sequence off and then adjust my exposure setting and fire the next three before I got any cloud movement. Here I used a very shallow depth of field and manually focused...actually since I learned how to manually focus last year, I have rarely gone to autofocus! I moved into Photoshop and cropped. I also applied a slight perspective crop due to the distortion caused by my wide angle lens. I also had to clean up some trash cans and a "Public Restroom" sign that was in the photo. I just did not feel that was appropriate here! I then pulled back the reds, oranges and yellows and then dialed back the overall saturation a bit. Thank you for your views, comments, and faves! I appreciate them. Looks like sunset may be good tonight. Wonder if I am going to get any sleep before going to work tonight? Might not! Please do not use my images on blogs or websites without my permission. All of my images are for license and sale. Thank you.
