.

^

"o.winston link
photographed the demise of steam locomotives in the '50s. mostly night photos, he used a huge variety of arrays of flash bulbs with miles of wire in the days before flash slaves. self-taught, link kept detailed notebooks illustrating his meticulous preparations for making photographs at night. he planned them using one of the basic laws of physics; that the angle of incidence of a light source is equal to the angle of its reflection. he would angle the lights back toward the camera to produce highlights on the locomotives and railroad cars moving through the darkness. camera angles, lighting unit positions and exposure settings were all carefully recorded. He had special flash reflectors built, one of which could hold up to eighteen bulbs, for lighting huge areas. he used a power supply which he designed and built that could fire sixty flashbulbs at once, while at the same time tripping the shutters of three cameras, all perfectly synchronized together. electrical cable connected the flash unit's cameras and power supply, and Winston carried thousands of feet of it in a trailer towed behind his car. photographs could take from several hours to days to set up, and there was only one opportunity to get the shot as the train sped by, sometimes at sixty miles per hour.