WASILLA, ALASKA: WHERE THAT LONESOME WHISTLE BLOWS

I don’t know why I love shooting this time-consuming, money-draining train photograph project but I do.

**Sigh **

I have tried this shot six times over the past two and and a half weeks - maybe ten times if you count the nights I waited until nearly 11:00PM, by which time the light had lost its luster and I saw no train. I just can’t get it right. Something always goes wrong.

This is my attempt from last night. At the moment, the spread in my book set aside for this picture is occupied by the second shot I took, which in many ways is more dramatic, due to the amount of snow still on the mountains, the clouds over them no smoke, and the radiance of the light, but has other flaws. Truly, I do not know which of the six is best. The flaws in each just bother me.

Yet I must include shot from this vantage point, even if it’s not perfect. So far, none are. In this case, the framing slipped just a tiny bit to the right a moment before I shot the picture and cut the frame right at the edge of Krazy Moose Subs sandwich shop in the historic Teeland general store building. I had been very careful to hold the left edge a pleasing distance from Teeland’s and the right edge just to the right of the brown pickup truck on the far right, but at a certain point I have to concentrate fully on the lead locomotive and in those few seconds Sancho pivoted just enough to destroy my intended framing.

If you have a big enough screen or can zoom in on the Clock Tower clock, you will see I took this picture right about 9:53 PM. There are other images I want to use the late night for. So I am going to move on and use the late light for other images but might come back and reshoot this again later. Or maybe I will just accept the fact that perfection will never be mine, no matter how hard I try.

The smoke has drifted in from wildfires. All this hot, dry, weather has led to official predictions of a severe Alaska fire season this year.