by Steve Eshom on June 4, 2008
rrf.com is at it again with another advanced topics challenge. This month it is ‘creative panning’. Of course with trains there’s always movement so panning opportunities abound! (well at least there should be some movement eventually, maybe, someday) On Sunday, the first day of the challenge, I tried my hand at a couple of pans and had mixed results. My photos ranged from completely blurry to pretty sharp and dramatic. Some of the things I noticed are:
- Slow moving trains in bright light are difficult to pan. When it is so bright the shutter speed has to be so slow that getting the wanted blur causes unwanted blurs. A couple of my attempts were at 1/10 @ f/22 which is the minimum aperture for my lens.
- Sharpness is difficult to achieve when attempting a pan. There are two causes, the slow shutter speed and where the focus point is set. I found I have to pre-focus the camera at the spot where I want to take the image and then track the subject into that spot. I’m also going to try using my camera’s tracking focus to see how that works out.
- Trains moving above 40 m.p.h. gave the most dramatic pan effects.
To help with some of the observations I’m considering trying the tripod. This will require carefully levelling to make sure I can successfully pan along a level horizon. I’m sure some practice with it will also be required.
It should be fun to work on this throughout the month!
The M-PTLPAS crosses Eighth St. and heads out of town.
Technorati Tags: trains, railroad, photography, photo, vancouver, washington, bnsf, creative, pan
by Steve Eshom on May 4, 2008
Railroadforums.com is running an advanced contest this month on Creative High Contrast B&W. I won’t claim to be an expert in this topic but for some reason the bug bit me and I spent some time editing a bunch of photos in Lightroom yesterday afternoon. Whoops, there went an hour and a half! Still it was a rewarding experience and I found a few old images that would work for the contest had they been taken in May of 2008.
With the demise of the Weyerhaeuser log train last Wednesday I thought this would be an appropriate topic.
The Cascades. This is re-edit of an image I took in March.
by Steve Eshom on April 24, 2008
by Steve Eshom on March 23, 2008
As I’ve mentioned before I really like Lightroom. As a software package it provides most of what I need to organize and edit my photos. For those things that LR wasn’t designed to do naively Adobe provided a method for developers to construct their own export plug-ins to fill in the gaps. LR was also constructed so develop module edits can be saved as a preset and web and slideshow outputs can be customized using templates. I believe this flexibility will be one of the key factors to LR’s long term success (and potentially some smart developers 
)
I’ve started using a couple of presets and plug-ins that I’ve found useful. With presets the field is long and wide since they are easily created out of Lightroom (click the + next to presets and choose the develop options to save) and quite a few photographers have published their presets on their websites. Do a Google search on ‘Lightroom Presets’ and you’ll see what I mean. Just because the field is so large doesn’t diminish the fact that this is fabulous ability it just shows that photographers want to share their skills.
Plug-ins and templates are a bit more challenging because they require external development work and testing so the field is a bit more limited. Despite this barrier the two plug-ins I use most LR/Mogrify (export tools) and LR/Enfuse (HDR) are quite powerful and really add a lot to the basic export features of LR. Web and slideshow templates are an area I haven’t delved into too much yet though I’m carefully watching some very intriguing web gallery and slideshow tools. I’m hoping to take advantage of these for my gallery sometime in the future.
This photograph of a northbound BNSF Manifest at Steilacoom was made with LR/Enfuse. The first photo was edited to maximize the exposure on the mid and foreground. The second photo was edited to maximize the expose on the sky and background. LR/Enfuse then combined the two to increase the dynamic range of the image to provide a better appearance in the highlight areas which weren’t the main focus of the original exposure.
Technorati Tags: train, railroad, photo, photography, lightroom, LR/Enfuse, LR/Mogrify, preset, plug-in, template, develop, slideshow, web
by Steve Eshom on November 21, 2007
Many new digital photographers ask the question “Should I use my camera’s RAW output or .jpg?”. As we move further into the digital era this question gets asked less and less, but there are still those that ask. For those that ask me, I always recommend RAW. Why? It provides complete information from the capture which image processing software can use to finish an image.
Do you still need some evidence? If so jump over to Luminous Landscape and take a look at the tutorial Michael Reichmann posted on the topic. The difference between the two is pretty significant.
Technorati Tags: comparison, jpg, photography, railfan, railroad, raw, trains
