DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY MAKES AMATEURS LOOK GOOD. A large, black, backlight object would cause me no end of trouble, even with 25 years of practice with Kodachrome 64 and the Canon AE-1. But one of the laws of ferroequinology holds that steam locomotives will invariably present themselves with the sun in the wrong place.

Illinois Railway Museum, 1 August 2010.

Solution: turn the flash on. That automatically changes the exposure. Then use the exposure-manipulation software on the computer to crop and tweak at home. Not publicity-photo grade, but acceptable under the circumstances.

Side benefits: no waiting for the photos to return from the camera store (or latterly, Wal-Mart, the last business in DeKalb County trading with the Kodachrome lab); no toxic chemicals used in tweaking the image, no waste of paper with trial exposures in the enlarger.