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Field Trip Report: O. Winston Link Museum – Part 2 of 2

Click on each picture for a closer look!
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In an earlier News Posting we introduced you to the O. Winston Link museum in Roanoke, Virginia. In this posting we focus on O. Winston Link’s work and how he produced these spectacular images.
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The museum displays at any given time several hundred of his images and also wonderfully tells the story of his life and his work. Touring the museum is like walking through a book. It truly takes a few hours to explore despite its modest size. There is also an excellent movie about his life which plays hourly in a several hundred person theatre.
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In this posting we see pictures of a number of his prints. These are “pictures of the prints” that I took so the actual images have even higher quality. Most of his photography was done at night and very carefully planned and staged. He took this approach to allow him total control of the lighting of an image. He developed his own control system to control the simultaneous use of hundreds of flash bulbs to capture a given image. The results were very powerful and dramatic images for which he became quite famous but only decades after he took them.
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As one leaves the museum, the image of O. Winston Link shown at the lower left thanks you for coming. For anyone interested at all in railways and railway history, this beautifully executed museum must be visited. It is so well done that it would appeal to anyone with an interest in great photography and a good biographical story.
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For more information about the museum, visit their website here. The entire collection of images is accessible online. Also note that the museum sells books of his photographs at a very reasonable price. I have two of them and they are excellent.
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Click here to return to Part 1 of this series.

Posting by Russ Milland; Images used with permission of the O. Winston Link Museum
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