by Oren B. Helbok/photos by the author
Before you go out for a day of photography, how much planning do you do? Do you like to have every location already scouted, with notes about not only train schedules but from which direction the sun will shine? Or would you rather take your chances and take what you can as you find it, improvising as scenes open up before you? My own style mixes these two approaches; I mostly photograph steam trains and their crews, so I have very limited locations and times to choose from. But on any given day I’ll stay out from before dawn until after dusk if possible, trying to capture as many different aspects of a railroad’s or museum’s operations as possible, following the action and keeping my mind open. Along the way, something always seems to happen that makes for a memorable image.
Three friends and I spent the first day of February 2025 at the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum in Alna, Maine. Among us, we have a variety of experiences with the railroad. Since 2021, I have made the thousand-mile round trip from Pennsylvania eight times; Dennis Livesey has visited five times since 2016 (and remarkably, the two of us inadvertently crossed paths in Alna in the summer of 2022); Eugene Armer had gone once before (the previous February, with me); and our young friend Shane Blisché soaked in WW&F’s two-foot-gauge magic for the first time.
On “Steam & Sleighs” days, the railroad transports passengers from Sheepscot to SeaLyon Farm at Top of Mountain where railroad history meets modern agritourism. The four of us wanted steam in the snow, and we got exceptionally lucky. On Friday night, five inches of fresh powder fell on top of a good base, and late on Saturday morning the clouds blew away. We made our photos all afternoon under a clear, blue dome while occasionally up to our knees in the drifts. The temperature never rose above freezing and 134-year-old 0-4-4T 9 skipped through the piney woods and the horse-drawn sleighs shuttled happy people to and from the farm. We could not have asked for a better day.
No matter the weather, I love to watch a railroad crew go about their business when the trains simply run for the customers, as much like they did in the old days as the 21st century allows. I do not pretend that my photos actually depict regular service in the old days, but I want them to have that feeling. It helps that WW&F’s volunteers have seen enough photographers — and they know me well enough — that they have no self-consciousness in front of a camera; my friends and I know well enough not to do anything foolish that would make the railroaders pay us unwanted attention.
In mid-morning at Sheepscot, with the 9 hot, its crew turned the locomotive on the armstrong turntable so it faced north and then headed for the car shed in the North yard to collect their three-car train. After fireman Jay Monty threw the main line switch by the enclosed water tank, he stepped up onto the locomotive; from my vantage point near the end of the passenger platform, I framed Jay and the 9 between the section house to the left and the water tank to the right (both buildings replicas of long-vanished prototypes elsewhere on the common-carrier WW&F, which ran from 1894 to 1933).
A while later I posted the photo on Facebook, and my friend Jeff Brouws commented, “Henri Cartier-Bresson would applaud your capturing of a ‘decisive moment.’” Of course, I appreciate the reference; who doesn’t like getting mentioned in the same breath as a revered photographer?
But I can honestly say that I caught that particular moment more or less by chance; I’d aimed the camera at a scene and caught Jay’s movement within that scene through the modern-day expedient of making more than one exposure and choosing the best one to process. Pixels essentially cost nothing, no matter how many gazillions one accumulates, and thousands of images fit onto one memory card. Cartier-Bresson, of course, used film, which came in limited quantities — 36 exposures on a standard 35-millimeter roll — and without a motor drive he had to advance the film and reset the shutter after every shot, which takes a considerable amount of time as one tries to capture a moving object. Especially as I get older, and as my eyesight drifts away from 20/20, I rely on “spray and pray” in a way that I never could afford to do with film.
In 1957, Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) told the Washington Post, “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment had come out in 1952 (called in the original French “Images à la sauvette” — literally, “images on the sly,” figuratively “hastily taken images”), per the same Wikipedia article in which I found the preceding quote.
For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from Volume 2 of the memoirs of 17th century Cardinal de Retz, “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.” Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said, “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
Another image here bears a pleasing symmetry to the photo of Jay, made on the same day and of a subject in exactly the same place but from a vantage point 180 degrees opposite from where I had stood a little over six hours earlier in the yard. The 9, wreathed in her own steam, now backs past out-of-service Bridgton & Saco River 2-4-4T 8 and toward the shop building where her crew will bed her down for the week. After the 9 has passed the same switch that Jay threw in the morning, Ed Lecuyer lines it for the main as a precaution against any stray equipment entering the enginehouse lead (top right).
Have I caught the decisive moment?
I know I did not consciously intend to at that instant; hastening down the main line track after photographing the 9 putting away her train in the North Yard, I saw the tableau including Ed at the switch stand in front of me, and I stopped to make a few exposures. I do not remember specifically trying to capture Ed in the best silhouetted attitude — and in all probability, at that distance and in that lighting and at a 48mm focal length, I could barely see him in the viewfinder. So I pressed the shutter button a few times, adjusted the focal length, and pressed it a few more times. I simply recorded the scene and then hastened to the next one, as the 9 moved onto the turntable with the setting sun over its shoulder.
Weeks afterward (and after Jeff’s comment), while going through all of the day’s images on the 24-inch monitor at home, I discovered that one of those with Ed looked worth working on. After an hour of cropping, desaturating, layering, cloning, curves, and other digital manipulation, it came into focus, so to speak. Nonetheless, I still had doubts; would anyone recognize the action undertaken by the small figure in the center of the photograph? I ran it by my wife; Sara has looked at my pictures for 35 years, and she has even spent a little time trackside now and again, but she would never call herself an expert at either photos or trains. I did not prep Sara in any way before showing her the image and asking, “What do you see?” She mentioned shadows and steam and wondered, “Is there a locomotive there?” And then, to my relief, she said, “And someone throwing the switch.” Okay, if a layman can make sense of it, it seems likely that a large proportion of the people who will ever see this photo (i.e., a bunch of railfans) will also.
It has become a cliché for me to say that I stand on the shoulders of the photographic giants whose work I have admired and learned from for decades. Many people have heard me say, too, that a photograph often needs a thousand words; the four of mine here have more than 1,600 hanging on them. Perhaps this brief excursion through one photographer’s eyes and into his head, with a detour through some photographic history, might inspire other photographers to think more broadly and deeply about their own methods and images, just as Jeff’s comment inspired me to think more about mine.