wenige Minuten später

After a bit of luck, the farewell bid to two of my favourite EF and EF-S lenses, and some additional cash, I acquired myself a 34-year-old f/2 90 mm Leitz Canada Summicron lens. It's not in perfect shape, but it's good enough to have me believe that the previous owner, or owners, have seldom used it. After all, 90 mm is not terribly useful in general photography, but it sure makes trains look nice (so yeah, weirdos like me might find it useful). After nicely forcing a friend of mine into doing some pro bono modeling work, this lens, at f/2, wow. But that's not the point of this post. This lens is supposed to be nice for portraits. I'd be more surprised (feeling cheated, and perhaps devastated) if it wasn't. What I really wanted to do, was to point it at some trains. Crank the focus ring to infinity and off I went, to some random S-Bahn stations I deemed suitable on the map. The last mark on the focus scale before infinity is at 50 ft., or 15 m., it may just w...

The persistently cloudy weather these days has been discouraging. But good things (sometimes) come to those who wait. All I needed was a few minutes of cooperation from the weather, and luck was on my side, just as the sun was about to dip below the Cologner skyline. I had to do quite a bit of cropping to get the result I wanted. Although it was a 50mm f/1.5 Voigtländer Nokton lens I had used, the end result was probably closer to something from a 90mm lens. Focusing on a rangefinder on a 50mm lens was easy enough for this shot since all I had to do was leaving it at infinity. The aperture was closed down to something like f/5.6 or f/8, although I probably had enough light to go all the way down to f/16. I didn't want to take a chance with moving trains and depth-of-field wasn't an issue here. Having metered the bright sky before I clicked my shutter, I was pleasantly surprised about how clean the shadows were once I brought them up in Lightroom. This heartbreakingly be...

I've been trying to take photos of trains with a 50mm prime lens lately. The results haven't been very pleasing to me. It's something about the angle and composition that I somehow just can't seem to grasp. The lack of access to a car, also puts quite a significant limit on where I can try to take photos from (S-Bahn Stations, streets/structures not too far away from public transit, etc.), so I can't really go to nice fields, or glamorous hills, or anything of that sort, all that often. Straight out-of-camera JPEG here. It could probably use a bit of straightening and cropping, but I'm not sure if this is the most flattering angle for this little Br 422. I like the looks captured by telephoto lenses, but I sure don't like to travel with them a lot. Got caught a bit off guard by what looks like a ballast train, so left the camera in ISO 200 and aperture priority mode (if I remember correctly). The shutter speed suffered a little as a result, but I do...

I have to confess. Lately, updating my old blog, Train of the Week, on a rigid weekly schedule, had become a bit of a chore. Although it has been around for longer than I originally expected about half-dozen years ago, it still doesn't feel all that good to phase it out, regardless of whether or not anyone actually reads it. No, the trains are not going away. This new blog, although still mostly railroad-themed, will be more than just trains. And, hopefully, without restricting myself to a schedule that sometimes I dread, the content will become of higher quality again. And of course, none of that is actually the main point. The success of this refresh will be defined by the re-ignition of my interest in blogging. I want to make blogging fun for myself again. Before I stop typing, the unsightly URL of this blog, "wenige Minuten Später," German for "a few minutes late," is a common occurrence in my experience of living in Germany so far. So is the phrase ...