There have been some really great sunsets up here in the Puget Sound recently. I love photographing sunsets and trains. Here’s a sunset shot with a little more than a triangle of lights to portray the railroad.
Hope you enjoy!
Simply gorgeous, Steve.[tup]
Most women talk of walks along the beach, watching the sunset, etc.
I love these, too, but adding in a train headlight makes it even more perfect!
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Mookie
Steve -
Very nice ! Another fine addition to your portfolio. Many of these would make a nice static display arrangement on a big wall, or as a dynamic “slide show” on a flat screen TV as a background point of interest in a room, etc.
I was discussing/ describing railroad photography with someone over the last week, and the following idea came up:
A night or dusk/dawn photo of a passenger train, where the interior illumination is pretty much visible - the windows show up as “lighted rectangles” kind of thing.
Most photos of passenger trains at night aren’t all that different from freight trains - shorter and shinier, but the windows appear mostly dark. That may be caused by the anti-sun tinting, but the result is pretty lifeless. It occurred to me that a photo where the windows are brightly lit against a dark train and background would have a lot more “snap” to it and convey quite graphically and clearly exactly what the subject is - nothing else like it.
I don’t know that anyone since O. Winston Link (and maybe not even him) has accomplished this, certainly not very often. Unless you can get flash units on-board, it would probably have to be a time-exposure at a station stop or when held for a signal or opposing movement, etc. - good luck knowing when that will happen ! On the other hand, you do seem to be on good terms with the frequency of raising of that certain drawbridge, so maybe . . . . ? Or, perhaps with the digital camera wizardy now available, you could get a decent image while it is in motion, but I don’t know that with any confidence.
Anyway, just a thought. It’s beyond my capabilities right now, but I thought you might be interested. I’d like to see your thoughts on it, and any attempts at same that you may care to try.
Thanks for the nice comments!
Paul:
I think you hit the big issue. Lighting the interior. Those Talgos have deeply tinted windows and as I recall they are not very well lit and night. I think you’d need the co-operation of Amtrak and/or much better Photoshop skills than I have.
Intriguing concept though.
Tinted windows do cut down on the light quite a bit
Beautiful shot, Steve! I like that one a lot. Photos of trains are nice, but it’s really fun to see a scene like this that contains just the suggestion of a train. The triangle of lights adds just enough to make this scene come alive. Well done.
Paul – I think what you’re talking about could be done, but it would have to have some very specific circumstances to make it work right. For starters, it would almost have to be a “blue hour” shot like the shot that Don posted. Manmade lighting balances out very well against natural lighting in the hour or so after sunset. A truly dark shot might work too, but you probably wouldn’t have a lot of detail in your sky and the rest of the scene.
Additionally, I think that if the windows were tinted a lot, the photographer might have to do an HDR (high dynamic range) shot because the dynamic range of the shot might exceed what a current sensor can “see.” Our eyes can pick out a much greater range of light intensities in a given scene than even the best sensors.
So an HDR shot would work. Of course, it would work best with a stationary train so the photographer could get multiple exposures of the same scene. A moving train might be possible with multiple conversions of a single RAW file, though. It would depend a lot on the camera and how much data the camera can catch in that one RAW image.
I’ll have to play around with this concept a bit and see what can be worked out to give more definitive answers.
Great shot. Your avatar is pretty cool-looking, too!
[tup] I agree, great shots Steve