Last week, late afternoon sun illuminated terraced vineyards south of Lorch along the Rhein’s Right Bank (east) which I thought made excellent conditions for railway photography.
I pictured double headed DB class 185 electrics leading a chemical train northward using my FujiFIlm XT1 with 18-135mm zoom lens.
Tracking the Light Posts Daily!
Here’s a visually challenging situation: a semi-gloss black locomotive with yellow lettering cross-lit by the afternoon sun.
‘Cross-lit’: when a train has the front lit by the primary light source (in this case the sun) while the side of the train remains on the ‘dark side’ (that opposite from the primary light source).
In certain situations cross lighting can be used for dramatic effect; in others it may be viewed as unfortunate or non-conventional.
At Pampilhosa, I found cross-lighting was a good way to show the scenery, the empty freight train, and the effects of overhead catenary.
But does this photo work?
Brian Solomon is traveling in Portugal and may not be able to respond promptly to questions or queries. Hopefully photos will display without difficulty.
Tracking the Light Posts Daily.
On this May 2006 morning, Denis Mc Cabe and I focused on a westward freight led by a class 131 double-electric.
This was working on the busy double-track standard gauge (4 feet 8.5 inches) mainline to Kosice. However, our primary interest was catching movements on the adjacent Russian-gauge iron-ore line (seen to the left of the double-track line).
At that time ore-trains passed about every two hours.
This was my second visit to eastern Slovakian hot-spot at Kalsa, and it was the third visit for Denis who located this place a few years earlier.
Our success in eastern Slovakia led us to travel to western Ukraine the following year, which proved to be an exceptionally rewarding photographic endeavor.
Lately, I’ve made a project of scanning my Slovakian slides.
Tracking the Light Posts Daily!
Red Electric in Soft Sun Light.
Thunderstorms had blown through earlier in the afternoon. Then the sun beamed. All the while Netherlandse Spoorwagen’s double-track north-south mainline south of Dordrecht was saturated with an unceasing parade of trains. (See my earlier post: Netherlandse Spoorwagen Koploper near Dordrecht Zuid, Septemeber 2013).
NS keeps trains flowing one after another, and doesn’t seem to have any qualms about running freight tightly between passenger trains. I found that about every half hour a freight would be slotted in.
I made this photograph with my Canon EOS 7D with f2.8 200mm lens, set at ISO 400 f 4.5 at 1/1000th of a second. In post-processing, I made minor adjustments to contrast and saturation to match how I perceived the light at the moment of exposure.
This was one of the last exposures I made before sundown. A former Netherlandse Spoorwagen electric leads a southward Deutsche Bahn freight. While I’d seen several of these classic electrics on the move, this was the only one I caught in nice light hauling freight.
