It's Always Sunny in 1952 Baltimore

Honoring Edward S. Miller

I never had the privilege of meeting Edward S. Miller, but in retrospect, I really wish that I had.  

Born in Danville, PA in 1920, Edward S. Miller was a highly regarded railfan and photographer whose photographic masterpieces can be found in numerous publications. After serving in World War II, Mr. Miller returned to the US and operated streetcars for the Capital Transit Company in Washington DC for a number of years.  After moving on from CTC, he would travel rather extensively and capture some of the most unforgettable streetcar and railroad images of the era on his Leica camera he acquired in 1952.  

Mr. Miller was known in particular for being a "location" type photographer, instead of a "roster" (or "wedge") shooter.  His scenes do a phenomenal job of evoking a nostalgic magic that truly shows the feel of an era that was about to decline rapidly.  His work truly shows the achievement of the "sweet spot" between vehicle photography and location photography to create a true "scene" in his images, be they of a bustling street corner, or a bucolic wooded setting tucked away in an obscure setting.

As one excellent article on Mr. Miller aptly states, he "was careful about his compositions. While the trains form the central point of the photographs, he made it a point to get other elements in the picture to set the scene and give it a unique sense of time and place, whether it be a trolley gliding down a palm-tree-lined avenue in Los Angeles or picking up passengers en route to Sans Souci Park in Hanover Township. He loved to get people in the pictures, unusual geographic features, colorful elements such as flower gardens or neon signs."

An online collection of a number of his works, primarily concentrated on Baltimore can be found at this website.  It is certainly worth a leisurely look through the amazing images to get a look at what Baltimore was like in this era.  I almost wonder if they make the Monumental City look too good, given the particularly high ratio of vivid and colorful sunlit exposures! Regardless, there are countless images in this collection that literally make me want to "crawl in the time machine portal" to join Mr. Miller in 1952 Baltimore with a camera in hand to record my own exposures of the scenes that he so amazingly portrayed, though I'm sure mine would be inferior to his.  

Sadly, Mr. Miller passed away in April of 2010 at 90 years of age.  He is kindly remembered for his never ending interest in all things railway related, as well as his generosity in sharing his images to enable future generations like myself to get a window into a world we never knew. He is certainly missed, even among those of us who were never fortunate enough to have met him.      

Transit Photography Then and Now

I've been thinking lately.

Pondering actually.  What about?  Why does it seem that a lot of transit images of the past are so much more visually interesting than the majority taken today?

I used to think it was purely nostalgia at play.  The street scenes of the 1940's-1970's were just far more visually interesting than those of today. While this does play a large part, at least from my personal perceptions, it is not the only factor at play.  In fact, the nostalgia factor may not even main factor that tends to make the older photos interesting.  

For example, consider these two photos, one taken in 1967, and one taken 43 years later in 2010:

 

While the photo from 1967 certainly has the nostalgic appeal of the old Brill bus, it offers very little else in the way of visual appeal.  Conversely, the modern photo has a wide range of extras that provide an enormous amount of context to the photo. making it much more interesting to view.

Ok, so?...

That all said, the vintage picture above is fairly atypical of older transit photography.  This all leads me back to my pondering.  

Thinking back to my own "career" in transit photography however, I can begin to make more sense of things.  When I started really getting into transit photography in 1989, my first equipment was not too far advanced over that used in the 1950's.  I had a Minolta X-700 with a standard 50mm manual focus f/1.7 lens.  Digital photography was only in its most embryonic of phases and was not even a consumer product.  

Thinking back, shooting on film with this camera was much different than shooting with the digital cameras of today.  The biggest reason was that, unlike in today's digital world, each exposure made on a camera incurred a noticeable cost.  Not only was there film and processing to account for, but it was not possible (as today) to take a test exposure for viewing.  With these costs, and the technical limitations, you pretty much had one chance to get your shot right, and you paid for every shot.  Given the fixed focal length lens, you also could typically only get but so close to the subject in action.  Despite all this, I was still able to get some good images in these early years.  

By 2000, digital photography was becoming increasingly mainstream.  Still, for all its advantages, the typical cameras of the time were in the 2-3 MP range.  This tended to be problematic for transit photography, as shots taken from the traditional perspectives had significant detail loss over film shots, and compressed jpeg files would look watery, practially turning 3's on fleet numbers into 8's! 

My first decent digital camera was a Casio QV-3000, which, while offering quite a lot in the way of neat features at the time, only had a maximum image resolution of 2048x1536. However, it also offered a zoom lens, and I found myself using it more and more in photography to minimize loss in image detail in vehicles, and as a result, sacrificing external details instead.  

As digital cameras continued to progress, zooms on many models hit extreme lengths, each model progressing in leaps in bounds over the previous year.  Simultaneously, the prices of these ultra-featured models were actually cheaper than models from previous years.  For example: today $280 can buy a Nikon 16MP camera with a 30X zoom (23mm-675mm in 35mm equivalent) that were features entirely unheard of when I paid $400 for my Casio camera over 12 years ago! 

The result is that there are some very affordable cameras available that have zoom features that were impossible years ago.  As such, the temptation to "zoom in" only gets easier to do. For some transit enthusiasts who are only really interested in the vehicle, this can lead to a tendency to habitually wedge shots, leaving the rest of the surrounding scene ignored, while also leading to insomnia from those viewing their shots, who would appreciate a bit more.