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Long Exposure in Railway Photography
By Bence Takács
Long exposure will bring your railway photos to another world. If you're more interested in the aesthetics of your pictures than on the accurate documentary of locomotives, long exposure by night is probably your domain.
In this intel I assume you're familiar with the usage of your camera and I'd like to focus more on the subjects and composition of night railway photos. Blue hour
Even a roster shot is going to have a completely different atmosphere if taken during the short time interval called the blue hour, which happens at roughly half-an-hour after sunset and before sunrise.
During the blue hour, except for when a very dense set of clouds butt in, the sky is going to be a deep blue in colour (see image 9). There's not going to be much light, so as with night shots always, you will have to use a tripod. The photos taken during the blue hour are going to be a lot more appealing than those taken during a pitch-black night.
It's relative shortness makes blue hour photos rare and therefore interesting. I always plan the end of my days during photo trips so that I'm at a good place with many interesting subjects around during the blue hour. The blue hour is also the best time for taking more complicated photos than simple roster shots. Panning
With todays high ISO dSLR cameras it's possible to take panned shots not only by dim daylight, but also at railway stations with installed reflectors.
Panning will help eradicate the sometimes not very nice backgrounds by blurring them and makes your photo look dynamic. Of course, the blue hour is probably the best time for a panned shot like image 1.
It's also a possible way to go when taking a photo of the train you're about to board: passengers, accessories of the platform, masts of the roof or the lamps will make it difficult to take a clean picture especially during the short time the train spends at a station, so doing a fine shot from a tripod is probably impossible. An ISO 1600 pan with Image Stabilization set to pan mode (usually mode 2 should be used to switch of horizontal stabilizing) will often produce acceptable results. Bringing your own lights
There can be many issues that will make you want to invest in a set of halogen lights and a few wires. There are many great photo locations where you'd like to take a night photo with poor or no own lighting. Poor lighting can mean too dim lamps, monochromatic lamps so you cannot set a decent white balance, which is always a hard thing with night photography, or just an unwanted backlight. Often the lights are installed at the walls of railway stations, so the stations itself are in dark, but if you turn your camera in their direction, you get huge halos around the lights.
A few 500W and a 1000W reflector is not very expensive, but you have to have good relations with the railwaymen to be able to use them. We often get electricity from the cashiers or traffic control (image 4), but many times we bring our own power source, for example to the Szilvásvárad Forest Railway (image 10), where we organized a night photo charter with a steam locomotive. Things that move
You can place many moving things in a train photo. The most classic thing is the vapour produced by a steam locomotive. Even when at rest, a steamer will sit in the middle of a cloud of mist, and as it's constantly changing the direction it's blown by the wind, you will have a nice, blurred aura of steam around the locomotive. See image 2. A human interest is always a highlight for a railway photo, in image 5 you can see a group of dancers with torches atop a steam locomotive during some midsummer night festivities in the Budapest Railway History Park. During such shots you have to consider the length of your exposure: during a long exposure maybe too much is going to happen, you can have a complicated web of lights in your photo instead of just a few, nice streaks of light. Also your subjects may move outside the photo during your exposure, and overexposure can be an issue too. A moving train
Trains only exist to move, but in most photos you take, a train could just as well be standing. Of course, you usually cannot create the illusion of moving with a photo taken in the 1000th of a second in direct sunlight, and too much motion would make it difficult to see the details of the train and its surroundings anyway.
Night photography is the domain where you should make your subject move in your photo too!
Because there's not going to be much seen of the train, choosing the best location for the photo is even more important in this case than with daytime landscape shots. Because a night shot is a game with light and darkness, a cityscape is always a good choice as a first. You should be careful with framing: just setting up your tripod somewhere by a rail inside a city is not going to be enough. A bunch of randomly lit block houses will not add much to your composition. Choose buildings that you think are interesting in themselves, have interesting lighting, like the church in image 3.
You can control how much the train is blurred by exposure time. A few tenths of seconds will be enough for just a bit of motion blur on the train, while for the light streaks of images 6 to 8 you have to use 30-60 seconds, depending on how wide a lens you use and how fast the train is going.
Light streaks are not subjects you should overuse. They are a way of telling railfans about some interesting landscapes. Good subjects are trees that can appear as a silhouette against the blue hour sky or the lights of the train, road traffic vs. trains, or the lights of some distant village. Winter is a great time for creative, night and sunset photography because of the short days. Don't put your camera away at three o'clock, see what the end of the day can offer!
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Contributor's Note
Any additional tips, links to favourite photos are welcome in the comments.
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Additional night photos on my website
| Night shots on railpictures.net
| A tool for determining the time of the blue hour at your location
         
1. Panned M41 by the Balaton
2. Class 242 streamlined steam locomotive at Budapest
3. Szent László church
4. MDmot trainset at Tiszalök
5. Midsummer Night's Dream
6. Night landscape
7. Passanger train by night
8. Ghost train
9. The retro-livery M41 2143 at Celldömölk in the blue hour
10. Steam in the forest
PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
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Congratulations on your first intel! You've done a great job. The photos look great.
Looking forward to seeing more from you. Rosemary
I have done a few long exposure shoots but no trains unless you consider the time I shot some at the London Underground.
Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Bence.
A very well written, 5***** intel in my opinion.
It's good to see you back.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes for a Happy New Year.
Frederick
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This intel was contributed by benbe
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May, 2012
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