Lighting up the Signals at Washington Boro.

Last night Kris suggested we drive around to find a train on the move, so we went over to Washington Boro, Pa., on Norfolk Southern’s Port Road Branch to check the signals.

We were in luck! And as soon as I saw that these had been cleared for an eastward move, I set up my 3Pod tripod.

Manipulating the camera in the inky darkness is easier said than done. As the train whistle announced its approach, I struggled to find my desired setting. I couldn’t see the dial and I was fighting with the camera to get the shutter speed, ISO, and lens settings where I wanted them.

Ultimately, I selected a default setting where the camera automatically set the ISO to 25,600 and allowed me to adjust the aperature.

All very well, but unable to see what I was doing led me to select some ‘random’ mode in the darkness that only exposed photos as JPG, rather than my usual setting that exposes both JPG and NEF (RAW) files simultaneously.

As the coal cars rolled by at speed on continuous welded rail, I finally got the camera into ‘M’ (manual mode), which enabled me to set the ISO to 200, the shutter speed to 90 seconds, and the aperture to f4. Unfortunately the White Balance was set to a daylight setting rather than an automatic, so I needed to fix the White Balance in post-processing.

It was pretty cool to finally catch a train here in darkness.