I’ve been making shadowy photos of trains at Palmer, Massachusetts in the gloom of night since the early 1980s. In my early days, I made black & white night photos of Central Vermont RS-11s and GP9s at Palmer. Back then, I often augmented existing light with a hand held Metz electronic strobe.

On our most recent trip, I made a long exposures of New England Central GP38-2 2168 working purely with existing light.

For this exercise, I braved 10F degrees in a light coat with my Nikon Z7-II with 24-70mm lens mounted firmly on a 3Pod Everest tripod. I made a series of 15 second exposures using the Nikon NEF RAW format and then adjusted the files in Adobe Lightroom.

The NEF format offers exceptional dynamic range which allowed me to significanly lighten the shadow areas to reveal impressive amounts of detail.

Tracking the Light Posts Daily!