photography

Seeing in the Dark.

There was only the faintest hint of blue in the evening sky.

I could hear Norfolk Southern’s 36A approaching as I walked back along the road to the Safe Harbor Bridge— itself an old railroad alignment.

For these images, I preset and locked my focus on the tall trestle and dialed in a +1/3 exposure compensation to boost the amount of light reaching the sensor. Working in aperture-priority (A) mode with the lens set to its widest opening (f/1.4), my Nikon Z6-III automatically set the shutter speed: 1/8 second for the first image and 1/10 second for the second.

I panned the head end of the freight as it rolled across the lower bridge.

What you see here has considerably more detail and appears much brighter than what I saw with my naked eye at the time of exposure.

NEF RAW file, processed with PureRaw5 with DeepPrime3 lens corrections and demosiacing, converted to DNG format and cosmetically adjusted using DxOPhotolab9.
NEF RAW file, processed with PureRaw5 with DeepPrime3 lens corrections and demosiacing, converted to DNG format and cosmetically adjusted using DxOPhotolab9.

Tracking the Light has explored railroad photography for 14 years!