Kenn Goutal Photography

"Two Bridges — One Tunnel" These two bridges cross the Potomac River between West Virginia and Maryland, at Harpers Ferry (WV). As of the date the photo was taken, the steel through-truss railroad bridge on the right was in daily use by the CSX railroad carrying crushed stone from a quarry in WV to Washington DC; the deck girder plate bridge on the left was in daily use by CSX carrying freight, Amtrak carrying passengers, and MARC carrying commuters.

This is one of several photos I took while on a trip to Harpers Ferry WV in September 2006.  I was down there for a photographers conference, and stayed with my niece and her husband.  (She is a portrait and former event photographer in that area, so we had much shop to talk.) We didn't get going until late in the day, and the weather varied from light to heavy overcast to heavy clouds, with spits of rain.  But whether one's interest is history, railroads, architecture, or "just" landscapes, it's a terrific place to go.  

Our first task was to walk across one of the bridges from Harpers Ferry to the Maryland side.  Yes, there is a pedestrian walkway on the bridge, complete with wheelchair access, with a chain-link fence separating it from the tracks.

On the other side, we spent some time exploring the C&O Canal Towpath while we waited for a train to make an appearance on one of the bridges.  We had no knowledge at that point regarding which of the two bridges was used for what purpose (if any), let alone any schedules.  From time to time we heard a horn that seemed quite near, with no train appearing.

steel through-truss railroad bridge This steel through-truss railroad bridge crosses the Potomac River between West Virginia and Maryland, at Harpers Ferry (WV). As of the date the photo was taken, it was in daily use by the CSX railroad, carrying crushed stone from a quarry in WV to Washington DC.

This is the first post directing you to a picture in my "scrapbook" or gallery.
This is one of several photos I took while on a trip to Harpers Ferry WV in September 2006.
I was down there for a photographers conference, and stayed with my niece and her husband.
(She is a portrait and former event photographer in that area, so we had much shop to talk.)
We didn't get going until late in the day, and the weather varied from light to heavy overcast to heavy clouds, with spits of rain.
But whether one's interest is history, railroads, architecture, or "just" landscapes, it's a terrific place to go.

This particular bridge had only one train cross it during the few hours we were there.
As it happened, it had to stop on the bridge and wait for a train coming the other way
(a commuter, I believe) to come through the tunnel and take the other bridge.
I was able to converse with the engineer through the fence.

At the moment, my main activity is uploading my collection of photographs to this and other sites.

This turns out to be more work than one might think.  Probably most of that is due to poor planning on my part back when I was first taking the photographs, or first scanning them in.

I have a fair number of photos that I have either uploaded to my main site www.kgphoto.biz or to Flickr (architectural details, for review by collaborators), or to pages on my personal web site (for consumption by family, friends, and colleagues).  I likewise have a fair number of photos that I have circulated in study groups and entered into exhibitions.

Now, however, I want to start publishing them, both online and, well, offline -- stores, galleries, exhibitions, etc.

I find that, because of the differing requirements of all the previous 'audiences', the files thus uploaded or submitted have strange file names, and are mostly in smaller sizes and at lower resolutions than will readily reproduced at larger than greeting-card sizes.

Also, extremely few (if any) have metadata in them, even simple copyright notices, let alone keywords, location tags, captions, comments, and so forth.

For a variety of reasons, it has turned out to be relatively difficult, or at least tedious, tracking down the "originals" of these image files.  In many cases, this is because the intended recipient required files to be named using their own format, not the name generated by the camera.  In the case of scanned images, of course, there *was* no convention.

So, now I'm hard at work, ferreting out the "originals" of the images in my "canon", and the largest, highest-resolution versions thereof, and converting them to formats suitable for the various labs and services I intend to use.

And adding metadata.  That has been an adventure all by itself.  But I'll leave that to another entry.

I'd like to reserve my "Welcome, Indeed!" post as my own "introduction".
I offer this post as one to which you can comment by way of an informal guest book.

This is my blog here on LiveJournal.

My intent (as of this writing) is to keep you up to date on my latest photographic activities, and show you some of my latest creative works.  Sometimes these will be photographs taken recently;  other times these will be photographs taken sometime in the past that I have only recently "developed".

No, I do not have (nor have I ever had) a darkroom.  I do, however, make extensive use of Paint Shop Pro, and have done so long before I started using a digital camera.

By way of introduction, I'll just say that I was a full-time computer programmer for 30 years.  In February of 1984, a magazine rekindled an interest, from earlier in life, in model trains, and that spilled over into an interest in actual trains.  In the course of spending many hours watching them, studying them, and taking notes and sketching locomotives and cars, I finally realized I needed a faster and more accurate way to do this, and turned to the Minolta SRT-201 all-mechanical SLR my wife and I had been given as a wedding present. 

But it was a slippery slope.  Next thing I knew, I was taking photos of the trackwork, the signals, the switch towers, and the buildings being served by the railroads. 

From there, it was all too easy to start noticing and photographing the beautiful scenery surrounding the railroads, especially the bodies of water and the rocky New England hillsides.

I was raised within a mile of the ocean, and spent the first several years of my working life living and working nearly as close, or even closer.  Between that and my gloomy nature, I'm something of a marshwiggle.  So as my photography progressed, my subject matter has tended to gravitate to bodies of water of all sorts.

As Andrew Wiles said, "I think I'll stop here."

— Kenn