Your Carriage Awaits

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/2.8
Exposure	1/30 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Last weekend two of my work colleagues got married. Like us they didn't want a church wedding but did want somewhere with atmosphere. We got married in a barn (albeit attached to a very nice hotel), they chose to get married in a warehouse. Specifically they got married in an old railway warehouse at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry. The room itself had fantastic walls and beams and was just perfect for a wedding. As an added bonus the museum ran the guests up and down a short section of track behind a replica of Robert Stephenson's Planet locomotive. So now you know the setup let's get down to discussing the photo.

Taking the photo was actually very easy. I was walking back from the toilets when I spotted the bride and groom stood near the engine. I took a couple of quick shots but didn't spend too much time thinking about composition or anything (my champagne was getting warm). The actual photo isn't actually that interesting. It's a little blurry and suffers from some horrible purple fringing (a known issue with the four colour CCD in the Sony DSC-F828). Having said that I quite liked the idea of a newly married couple waiting for the train. PaintShop Pro has an interesting feature that I've played with but never previously had a good excuse to use. The feature is called Time Machine and attempts to alter a photo to make it look as if it was taken at a specific point during the history of photography. There are seven different types of photos you can emulate; daguerreotype, albumen, cyanotype, platinum, early colour, box camera, cross process. I choose to use albumen which dates to around 1850, twenty years after the Planet was originally built. For comparison here are the other six types (in the same order as the previous list).

Some of these seem just a little pointless but having thumbed through old family photots I do quite like the look of albumen prints and I think this photo holds up rather well, even if no one is going to be fooled into thinking it is truly an old photo.

And finally, for all you steam train fanatics out there, I'll leave you with a few more photos of the replica Planet.

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