Your last sentence about taking one good photo per day is very appropriate. I think any rail photographer worth his salt, will be picky about what they attempt to shoot to start with, and with natural settings you always have the assumption that it could be a flop. Sometimes the best shots are the ones you plan, yet something else takes place to make it special. A lot of what makes a good steam picture has nothing to do with photographer set-up, but is more attributed to getting good performance out of the subject. For instance, you could have a super lit shot set-up at the lake Lobato with all the perfect ingrediants, but then the engine goes by with a clean stack. Make that same shot with a plume of smoke, and it looks fabulous, and shows the engine hard at work. Of course the photographer who knows what he is doing will at least shorten the odds, but picking locations that have "potential" for being great shots.
Also half the fun is getting that "one good one" amongst all the also-rans that keeps you coming back.
I do think its tougher for today's rail photographers to be as creative as the guys back in the steam days. There just are not all the neat props and infrastructure today that adds so much flavor to rail photography. You really have to be work to find interesting locations. Spots in the east that looked great during Link's days are probably overgrown with trees, or have other things that destroy the flavor. The buildings at North Fork, WV are a good example. When 611 ran in 1982, there were only about half of the store-fronts left from Links days.
The buildings, tanks, and other structures that remain on the C&TS, are a big reason why this place ranks so high on my list of throw-back railroads to the steam days. The mainline railroads today have very little left from the steam-era, and rightly so considering its been about 50 years now!
Greg
PS In the grand scheme of documentation of railroads through photography I would Rank Bob Richardson ahead of Link, since he captured the essense of the railroads of Colorado and what they were like. Link was almost a "Specialist" of rail photography, the likes of which we will not see again probably. I guess there are great photograhers out there that are to be respected for different reasons. Also there are a lot of good ones that never got any notoriety, but were closet railfans.
