Who knew train pictures could be so complicated

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 don't know, the blur doesn't look too bad to me.

I have this app on my iPhone that acts like a reflectance light meter, although I'm sure people would argue its actual worth. After playing with it for a while, I've noticed that it's not bad indoors. The settings usually agree with what the in-camera spot meter comes up with, but whenever I'm pointing it at some tracks waiting for a train to come around, the meter app is completely hopeless. I don't know what gives, but maybe I'll just rely on the in-camera meter from now on. The results don't look bad to my eyes at all, however untrained they are.

I'm barely touching the surface, and the technicalities are merely small fish in the big world of photography. It sure is a long road ahead, but fun regardless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feeding my GAS

At one point or another, we all fall victim to the notorious GAS, or the so-called Gear Acquisition Syndrome. To be honest, I was actually quite proud of the fact that I went through a bit of a down-sizing first. I went from a dSLR and a bunch of useless lens options, to only a few items of real high quality. That only lasted so long, before I became so mesmerized by the magical-looking Bokeh classic Meyer-Optik-Goerlitz lens made. At the first opportunity, I jumped onto the Indiegogo bandwagon, and pledged into the 1.9/75 lens. Like anybody who’s too eager and excited to even read the big print, I completely missed the fact that although the lens will come in M-Mount, but will not have rangefinder coupling. Say what? Of course, my M Typ 262 is so basic, that it doesn’t even support an external EVF. Now what? I guess I can still mount it onto my little E-M10, and use it as a 150 mm lens, but that defeats the purpose a little. For certain applications, the lack of rangefinder coupli
Read more

Steady, Ready, Go

Image
Sometimes, it's difficult to remember the basics. Case and point, I've always thought the 90 mm f/2 lens is so difficult to use, that most of them become out of focus simply because of focus-recompose. But it turns out, I was so deep down the "difficult to use" rabbit hole, I consistently forgot to check my shutter speed under less-than-optimal lighting. A simple rule of thumb (I don't have stabilization anywhere on the camera) states that the shutter speed should be the inverse of the focal length. Sometimes it may pay well to bump up the ISO and accept a slightly more noisy image, than a blurry one. In all fairness, my Leica M isn't the best performer in the dark, but at ISO 3200, it still isn't bad at all.  Lighting isn't bad at all, but I forgot to change ISO from 3200 Shutter speed was ample fast for me to nail the focus on the eyes -- The weather finally stopped sucking last weekend, and I finally drove my couch-potato-ass out of my ap
Read more

Where has the time gone

Image
At some point, I remembered starting to rejoin the workforce, and all of a sudden, here I am, with my blog completely neglected, and myself being no better financially than Day 1 at work. Nothing is as easy as you think of it before you really get into it. Anyway. I did have some chances to take pictures with my beloved Leica, although they were few and far between. I’ve also partly switched from trains to my new cat. She’s the most adorable thing. Oh, and I traded my APS-C sized Canon in for a Micro 4/3 Olympus mirrorless, so I can effectively double the focal lengths of my M-Mount lenses. That’s the direction I’ll go, I think. I might get one actual MFT lens at some point just so I have auto-focus when I need it, but otherwise, it will be aperture dials and manual focus all the way. Heavy Instagram filter applied, shot in Montreal with the good ole 2.0/90 wide open on the Leica M Forgot what lens, shot at wide open, with the Olympus (thank heavens for focus peaking), in
Read more