Das NachdemTatsacheFoamitergefilterenMaschinerei *PIC*

Tom, Roj, Rajah, John, the other John, Greg, et al -
We railfan photographers have for years yearned for a 'people filter' - or at least a 'foamite filter' - that, like a skylight filter, could simply be attached in front of the lenses on our cameras to purify the input. If said device also eliminated extraneous junk like large telephone poles and wires, TV antenae, and yellow pickup trucks, Volkswagen beetles and other railfan conveyances, so much the better! Although even in this age of auto-focus and image stabilization no one has yet been able to develop such a device for cameras, thanks to the good folks at Adobe Systems, Inc., "After the Fact Foamite Filtering Machinery" * - in the form of the 'rubber stamp tool' in Adobe Photoshop - does at long last help stamp out lots of distracting clutter from our Favorite Fotos.
This does raise a question however: "Where does recording of information for posterity end, and art begin?" Novelists, painters, and the Colorado Historical Society have an easy time of it when adjusting reality to fit their purposes, and those who print photographs - especially black & white - have been "burning and dodging" for generations. But for we railfans who grew up with 35mm color slides - which allow no after-the-fact tweaking whatsoever - it is truly a mind-boggling experience to be able to "clean up" our efforts before sharing them digitally with the rest of the whirled!
Tom G., John W. and I are currently assembling a large set of our photos from the sixties and seventies that Roger H. is planning to use to produce a Screen-Saver CD (or two) which we hope can be sold to raise funds for the restoration of D&RGW / C&TS loco #483. Two days ago, Tom sent me digital scans of a couple of his mid-sixties photos, and then a second copy of one of them in which he had - heaven forbid! - altered History by causing a car (His? Parked in the Wrong Place??) to mysteriously disappear from the image. I had previously altered one of my own 1968 photos by erasing a large telephone pole and its attached wires (but NOT Olaf Rasmussen's car), and had also attacked one of John W.'s historic photos from 1961 in a similarly uncivilized manner. Then, when adding two more of my '68 shots to the tentative selection, I got REALLY carried away and zapped not only inanimate objects like phone poles and the fender of a car (sorry, Olaf), but also a living, breathing FOAMITE who had DARED step between my lens and locomotive #498.
Where will it end? Where SHOULD it end? Will the dirty smoke emitted by the locomotives - surely offensive to the EPA - be next? Maybe we should eliminate those noisy, smelly locomotives themselves, and leave only the tracks - symbolically leading us off into the unfathomable future. But the very tracks are an Offense against Nature - maybe they too should be eliminated from our photos, and only the pristine, untrammeled wilderness of the Los Pinos and Chama River Valleys be presented for viewing ... " />
(I've been downloading or scanning, resizing and retouching, cropping and posting photos for ten of the last twelve days - as it says on a bumper sticker I acquired recently "I don't SUFFER from insanity - I ENJOY Every Minute of it!!")
Anyway, please check out the four sets of 'before-and-after' photos below, and tell me your opinion as to whether on the third one, and especially on the fourth one, I've gone a bit too far ...
- Russo de los Locos
* A rough translation of the subject line, above (or vice-versa).
Several (many, many?) years ago, there was a "Scientific German" dictionary published in my local newspaper. The definition of "Hydrogen Bomb" was something like "Sehr Grosses LoudenBoomer und Alles Kaput" ...
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