Cargo train

Shot last year, half a second pan @ 30mm f/2. Some cargo locomotive bringing in petrol.

Enjoy

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

That's a pretty nice result from a 1/2 sec pan! How many shots did you take to get it?

Very good for 1/2 second.

Hi,

Thank you for the comments. I only took one shot, as it was moving away quite fast. The engines were actually pushing the train, it was moving left.
is it me or is there a slight miniature effect to it? I used the Sigma 30mm as I dont't have a TS... maybe the blurred foreground gives that impression?

It does have that a little. I really like the colors. I might take out the blue & green in the background.

PhotosGuy, you don't know how happy I am you said you liked the colurs. It's the one single thing I feel I'm useless at - getting the colours right. I *am* happy with what i got here, even if you surely see some other hues on your screen lol.

As to taking those spots away from the background - I think you have a point, I'll try to remove them.

now for a riddle.. if shot @ 30mm f/2 for 1/2s, how dark was it outside? I'm curious to see what units you'd use to measure light lol

Probably not as dark as the inside of a coal bin at night?
How about this? 30 seconds... Malibu in the snow.

Or this? Midnight Applenappers; thieves in the night.

Allright, this is geek enough for me to actually check out some numbers.

So it's dark and you're exposing 30 seconds... now you have large quantities of snow in both your sets, and that adds to the problem of knowing exactly how dark it was outside.

As I have no unit to measure darkness, I'll cheat by making a comparison between how your shots came out and how they would have come out had there been less snow and some other surface instead.

Now the albedo (reflecting index) of snow is really high, it can go up to over 80%. Wikipedia tells me that the surface with the lowest albedo would be fresh asphalt, somewhere around 5% or so... Thus, you had the advantage of 80% reflected photons that ended up smashing against your camera's sensor. Had there been asphalt and not snow, the shot would have been 16 times darker (can you translate that in EV? I'm useless at this).

For the sake of argument I will consider that all light that entered your camera was reflected light, so it would have been 16 times darker outside had there been asphalt on the ground instead of snow, about half as dark if you had sand and 5 times darker if you had bare soil.

In astrophoto they use a scale for the darkness of the sky (well - to measure light pollution really) but it's arbitrarily chosen and cannot really apply for earthly photos as it's determined by the lowest magnitude star you can see at that particular moment. To be honest, to "how dark was it?" I'd have to answer "properly exposed an a Canon 7D with 30mm @ f/1.4 for 2.5s". But that would be ridiculous and the one asking would most probably smack me.

The key light for that image was the sky glow reflecting in the body, so I took a reading of that, took a shot, & adjusted from there. Don't try to make this stuff too hard. It will drive you nuts!

On the contrary, I have lotsa fun calculating useless stuff

On a side note, since you're a mod I wanted to ask - I have a small collection of trains, engines and various obscure trainstops... you think it's better to post them bit by bit in different posts or should I start a thread for it?

I'm not sure what you have in mind. You can't post "Everything I've Ever Shot of Trains", as you're limited to 8 embedded images per thread. Maybe a thread showcasing one particular train. Maybe a "Post your best shot of (whatever)" thread. We're supposed to be creative here, right?

I have some exotic ones, some with snow inside, some diesel - I wasn't going to post them all