Crossroads

Crossroads Hosted on Zooomr

The trains stopped running in Petaluma years ago, but the tracks are still around. These tracks are behind a hay and feed supplier that’s still in business, but not using the railroad. This shot is actually the bottom of a wider shot, but the tracks were the best part, so I cropped the image. This was also one of the first shots I took in RAW, and I’m glad I did.

This part of the original was in deep shadow. I had to adjust the brightness and contrast a lot. I could not have done it with a JPG file. The RAW format saved this shot. I was shocked at how much flexibility I had, even in Picasa. Picasa isn’t really designed for photo editing, but it did the trick with this image. I didn’t care much for the original shot, but thanks to some cropping and exposure adjustment, it was a favorite from that day. I’ll be shooting a lot more RAW, and buying a 4 gig compact flash card to make sure I have enough room.
See Zooomr for the geotag and a few other shots I did in RAW the same day.