Photographing the D&SNGRR

This week I rediscovered just how useful Glass can be.  The situation was trip to Durango, Colorado to ride the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.

Use case #1:  Directions to the condo.  Navigation... no problem.  Actually, this is kinda ho-hum now. 

Use case #2:  Weather forecast.  With a 70% chance of rain forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday, it looked very likely that we'd get an uncomfortably wet trip.  Flash flood alerts were posted for most of that time.  With Glass, the weather radar app gave me a useful animation showing the storms and how they were moving.  It was many times faster than using NOAA, iMap, or browsing to the Weather Underground.


As it turned out, we only got a sprinkle near Silverton on Wed. at noon and then a 1-hour deluge right after returning to Durango.  We weathered that last one by taking an early dinner at the Palace Cafe.  However, see use case #4 below. 

Use case #3:  Railroad photography.  The steam locomotive only travels with a top speed of 12 mph and often it's much slower than that in the tight turns and steep grades of the Animas Canyon.  Even so, photo ops are fleeting, gone in a few brief seconds.  With Glass I could react in time to capture still or video images, while those with traditional handheld cameras were still trying to get their cameras up to their eye and frame the shot.

The 10-second video snippets were my most common video format.   Out of 113 digital images taken, 28 were video.  They captured the motion of the trip and the accompanying sounds.  Prospective narrow gauge railroaders should pay attention to the opportunity for a rich auditory experience. 

Also and importantly, a digital camera is very intrusive.  Operating it takes one out of the moment standing between you and what you are seeing.  Glass lets you stay in the experience and still capture an image.  I heard it described with the phrase, "It's very unobtrusive" for the first time.

Use case #4:  An all day outing.  The train departed at 8:45 and the scenery became photo-worthy around 9:30.  Even turning Glass off over the 2 hour lunch break didn't save me.  By 3:00 the battery was less than 18% and shortly after that, it was toast.  I was unable to track the evening rainstorm and had to rely on the slow Wunderground.com Wx radar on my smartphone for that.  4-5 hours of heavy photography seems to be the battery limit.  (Side note:  This trip also drove my Droid Maxx down to 23%, about as much power consumption as I'd ever seen in a day.)