01/07/25 View of Silverton Colorado Narrow gauge

One of my favorite subjects is trains of all types, especially Steam engines. One of the most famous still running steam engines, is the Durango to Silverton Steam train.  This railroad runs along the Animas river the entire way and allows for some amazing images.  The only drawback is that you can expect to get covered in dirt and coal dust from all the smoke that comes back from the engine.

I was in Silverton back in September and had planned on traveling from Silverton to Engineer Pass, via Animas Forks.  My last trip there was way back in 2006 and I expected the roads to be of the same quality.  No, they were not and once you get to Eureka, where the old mill was, the road becomes a rutted mess, so bad that I figured it would take at least 3 more hours just to get to Animas Forks.  So we turned back to Silverton and were able to go down to the station to wait on the steam train to arrive.

This was a static shot, after the train was no longer moving but the crowds were everywhere, so I planned on not trying to use a tripod for focus stacking.  I am still going to remove the few folks in the image eventually.  The best shot was going to be on the other side of the train where the sun was shinning but the crowds on that side prohibited any photography.  So I worked on the shady side.

The image was taken with a Hasselblad X2D and 35-75 lens at approx 50mm.  I used base ISO of 64 and was able to pull up the dark shadows around the engine. Depth of Field was fine at this distance so I have all of the engine in full focus.