Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 DI VC G2
Lense, SB-700 Speedlights paired with Vello Flash Triggers, Slik Pro 500DX Tripod,
Lightroom & Photoshop CC
In the middle of October while out scouting water conditions in local
marshes, I noticed a train at the end of the track east of Bayard. I stopped
briefly in the morning to check it out and returned that afternoon to capture
some sunset images and wait for the stars to come out.
The D750 and the Tamron 24-70mm was the equipment of choice that
afternoon and night along with using the Slik tripod. The Slik tripod was used
over the VanGuard because the Slik allowed me to get lower to the ground since
its center column is shorter. I used manual focus and VR was turned off on the
lense. Shooting in RAW, I used aperture priority during sunset and then changed
over to manual mode once the stars came out. Aperture ranged from f2.8 to f11
while shutter speeds ranged from 5 to 15 seconds. ISO ranged from 100 during
sunset capture to 1600-6400 at dark. I used a pair of SB-700’s to light up the
track and train triggered by Vello Flash Triggers.
Lightroom CC was used to edit these images by creating a preset of
slider adjustments for the sunset images and then using the star preset I had
already made for the night images. A little further adjustments to the sliders
were made on an individual image basis but the presets were a great start and
saved time. When shooting the images, I did bracket the exposures with -2, 0
& +2 exposure compensation and found myself using the -2 exposed image in
Lightroom. The under exposed image allowed the sky to be exposed perfectly and
then train was exposed using shadow and exposure sliders in Lightroom.
In Photoshop CC, I first cloned out unwanted spots in the image and
corrected a lense flare problem in the star images that was created from the
light on the train. The content aware fill tool in PS worked pretty well on the
flare problems in the image. I then straightened and cropped the image if the
train was not perfectly straight. Using adjustment layer masks, small changes
were made to saturation and other sliders.
From spending three hours lying on the side of the railroad track to
processing these images, it was a joy to see these turn out like they did. I
even got alittle scare when half way through the night, the train engines
turned on and I believe no one was inside the locomotive. I got up off the track pretty quickly when the
engines fired up but returned to them when I realized the train wasn’t going to
go anywhere.
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