My next Railroad Photography 101 Class at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania will be held on Saturday Dec 13, 2025 from 9 to 11am. The theme to this class will be working with holiday settings, including how to make better night train photographs.
To prepare some material for the class, I went over to Strasburg the other night and made photos of Strasburg Rail Road’s holiday lights around the station using a Nikon Z6-III with f1.4 50mm Nikkor Z-series lens.
With the camera firmly mounted on a 3Pod tripod, I took a series of photos varying the lens aperture from f1.4 (widest setting to f8.0) as a test of the lens abilities. I allowed the camera to automatic adjust the exposure using a matrix metering setting. The white balance was set to A1 (‘auto’) and the color profile to SDR (standard).
The photos displayed here are converted and scaled directly from the Z6-III’s NEF Raw files without any post processing alterations to composition, color, contrast, exposure or any other visual elements of the photo.
This is a work in progress and in following posts, I will explore changes to holiday-night photo RAW files in post processing.
If you observe carefully, you may notice that the image exposed at f1.4 has a different color balance and is slightly darker that the others. This likely due to the shorter exposure time and the flickering effect of the LED holiday lights.
Tracking the Light Posts about railroad photography.