Fine Art.
Real Work.
Frédérick Manfred St Simon
Photographer · Railroader · Man of the West · Flagstaff, Arizona
Images
Publications
on the Iron
The West.
Lived & Shot.
SteelWheels.Photography is the work of Frédérick Manfred St Simon — professional railroader, photographer, writer, and unapologetic man of the West. Cigar lit, boots on the ballast, lens pointed at the truth. Six decades of chasing iron from the Great Northern yards of Great Falls to the high Sonoran desert, and a lifetime of living the story that four million tourists come to Flagstaff every year to find a fragment of.
The fine art railroad body of work — published in Trains Magazine, Locomotive, Railroad Heritage, and performed at Winterail — is one track. The other runs directly through Flagstaff: commercial photography, social media content, AI-accelerated copy, and custom web development for the businesses selling the living mythology of the American West to every traveler who rolls into town off Route 66 and looks up at the Peaks.
I am not photographing a lifestyle. I am the lifestyle — the railroader, the cigar, the high desert wanderer, the modern cowboy commanding his iron wagon train through the same country the Santa Fe scouts rode before him. I have been living this story longer than most marketing agencies have been in business. That is what I bring to your brand.
Every image made exclusively on Sony high-resolution mirrorless bodies — 40+ megapixel full-frame sensors paired with Zeiss and Sony G Master glass. The technical floor is as uncompromising as the compositional standard. A decade of Lightroom mastery, a writer’s instinct for narrative, and the non-conformist’s refusal to produce what everybody else is producing — all of it available to your business at a fraction of agency overhead. One source. No intermediaries. No committee.
And for the German visitors who came here chasing the landscape Karl May put in their imagination before they could read a map — he grew up there too. The immediate family is still in Germany. The obsession with Arizona is a shared inheritance, not a postcard.
The Santa Fe Trail did not disappear. It became steel. The wagon boss became the engineer. The consist is the wagon train — a hundred and forty cars, moving the commerce of a continent through the same corridors, the same country, the same imperative. Wagons ho became two long blasts and a highball out of the dispatcher’s office. The iron horse replaced the horse. The feeling at the grade crossing never changed.
Double Track.
Full Service.
Fine art railroad work and full-service commercial content for Flagstaff businesses — on equal footing, under one uncompromising eye.
The only thing that travels from client to client is the quality bar. That’s the brand.
12–20 original posts per month. Photography included. AI-accelerated copy written in your brand’s voice — whether that voice is a Route 66 road diner, a high desert outfitter, an Indian arts gallery, or a lodge at the foot of the Peaks. Platform-optimized for Instagram and Facebook. One round of revisions. The West has a story. Your feed should be telling it.
Interior, exterior, food, product, event, and architectural photography — fully edited and delivered with commercial licensing. The Flagstaff market is visually rich: red rock country, ponderosa light, Route 66 neon, turquoise and silver, smoke and leather. Every frame is made by someone who reads this landscape like a rail chart, and has the camera work to match it.
Clean, professional, fast-loading websites built from scratch — with appointment scheduling, contact forms, email integration, and the photography to fill them. No templates, no bloat. Code-built, photographer-filled, writer-voiced. Every client website is a complete brand presence, not a brochure.
Email newsletters, Google Business posts, promotional ad copy, caption libraries, seasonal campaigns — produced at volume, tuned to your voice. AI handles the velocity; the writer behind it handles the integrity. The result is content that sounds like you made it, because it was made by someone who reads and thinks.
Half-day and full-day event photography for festivals, openings, grand re-launches, private events, and NAU functions. Fully edited gallery delivered within 72 hours. Commercial licensing included. Flagstaff’s calendar is dense and the event market is a direct path to social media content, press coverage, and institutional relationships.
The complete stack: custom website, professional photography session, social media setup and first month of content, AI copy library, and Google Business optimization — delivered as a single engagement. For the business starting from scratch or rebuilding from the ground up. One contract. One voice. One source.
Industry-grade imagery for rail operators, publications, and corporate clients. Operational documentation to campaign-ready editorial — shot with the eye of a working railroader and the discipline of a visual artist. Printable to billboard scale.
Book a ShootMuseum-quality fine art prints drawn from decades of railroad portraiture across the American West. Available as limited editions or bespoke commissions. Each print is a document of industrial truth — a spike driven into paper, a moment held against entropy.
Commission a PrintImmersive field workshops across the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain rail corridors. Learn railroad photography from a working railroader — composition, movement, ambient light, and the unwritten code of the right of way. Limited cohorts.
Explore WorkshopsImmersive visual narrative productions for industry presentations, advocacy, festivals, and archival storytelling. Critically acclaimed work for WSDOT and presentations at Winterail — the premier gathering of railroad creatives — form the benchmark.
Discuss a ProductionStrategic visual consulting for railroad operators, heritage lines, and industry advocacy groups. Documentation, proposal support, and photographic testimony that changes minds in boardrooms and regulatory hearings alike.
Start a ConversationPersonal and professional portraits for business owners, hospitality operators, gallery artists, and outfitters. A face behind the brand builds trust. A portrait made with intention — not a headshot, a statement.
Book a SessionThe Works
“What Was Begun, Must Be Finished”
A multimedia presentation produced for the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad in support of its bid to retain operations of Washington State DOT’s Central Washington Subdivision. A photographic and narrative argument made in steel, light, and consequence — performed live and delivered where it mattered most.
“Metallic Machinations”
Produced and presented at Winterail 2019 — the pinnacle gathering of railroad creatives. An immersive multimedia production exploring the visceral machinations of modern railroading in motion, shadow, and sound. Premiered to the most discerning audience in the genre.
Workshops
Six workshops. Three territories. One instructor who has been making serious images in all of them for decades. Railroad corridors across the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain West. Three Arizona railroad corridors — the BNSF Transcon east to Holbrook and beyond, the Seligman Sub west to Kingman, and the former Santa Fe Peavine south to Phoenix. Limited cohorts. No hand-holding. Real work in real light.
The high grades, the mountain light, the loaded coal trains grinding upgrade through passes that have been bending iron since the Great Northern drove the first spike. This is the corridor where the scale of American railroading becomes physical. We work it from the inside.
The notoriously congested BNSF corridor through Spokane, anchored by the infamous Latah Bridge. We find new angles and unseen locations on one of the most intense, kinetic stretches of main-line railroad in the American West.
Ambient light photography at night — a whole other discipline. Crisp, clear images made under the cover of darkness across the Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho rail scene. Shadow, geometry, and the long patience of the exposure.
Flagstaff to Holbrook and beyond — the BNSF Seligman and Gallup Subdivisions heading east across the high Arizona plateau. This is the main stem of the former Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, still moving the commerce of a continent through the same corridors the original survey ran. Canyon Diablo. Two Guns. Winslow — where La Posada still stands beside active main line trackage and a hundred-car manifest rolls through before breakfast.
We work the grade crossings, the balloon tracks, the siding meet points where the dispatcher holds one train and clears the other. Long tangents in high desert light. The photographic vocabulary of heavy tonnage at speed across open country. This is not a foamer session. This is railroad photography taught by a railroader who ran this iron.
Flagstaff to Kingman and beyond — the BNSF Seligman Subdivision heading west through the high desert toward the Mojave. Williams. Seligman. Hackberry. Kingman. Route 66 runs parallel the entire corridor — the Mother Road and the iron road, side by side, both drawing pilgrims from the far side of the world to touch the mythology of the American West.
The grades dropping from the Colorado Plateau to the desert floor produce the operational drama that makes serious railroad photography possible: trains working hard, light changing fast, the geography doing what it does best. We work the corridor with the discipline of a man who has run trains on it and knows exactly where to stand when the light is right and the power is coming.
The former Santa Fe Prescott & Phoenix Railway — known to every railroader who has ever run it as the Peavine — descends from Flagstaff through Prescott and into the Valley of the Sun on one of the most photographically underrepresented railroad corridors in Arizona. Curves, canyon crossings, dramatic grade changes, the geological shift from ponderosa plateau to Sonoran desert compressed into a single run.
Almost nobody photographs this line. That is the point. The images that exist of the Peavine are either archival or incidental. This workshop puts serious photographers in the right locations, at the right hours, with the context of someone who understands what makes this corridor operationally and visually distinct from the Transcon. The undiscovered lane is the one worth working.
Get in
Touch.
Workshop inquiries. Commercial commissions. Licensing. Every message is read and answered personally — not by a system, not by a form response. By the photographer himself.
simon@steelwheels.photography
(928) 605-7984 · Direct
Flagstaff, Arizona · 7,000 ft