Low clouds, bright city lights, and lots of freight on the move; that was my brief experience touring Houston’s railroad yards on the evening of December 18, 2018.
Tom Kline gave my father and me a whirlwind tour and I made atmospheric grab shots as we drove around.
The photos here were made using high-ISO on my FujiFilm XT1. These were made ‘on the fly’, handheld from Tom’s truck without benefit of a tripod or set up time.
I was delighted with my results and I’ve promised Tom that someday I’ll return for some daylight photography.
We rode south on the Houston Metro Red line and made photos at Hermann Park—a relative patch of greenery in an otherwise heavily urbanized environment.
I exposed these views using my FujiFilm XT1 with f2.0 90mm lens.
To make the most of the scene, I used shallow depth of field (by working a wide aperture set manually) and panned the passing light rail cars to convey a sense of motion and depth.
The sun had set on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited before we arrived at Houston, Texas last week.
This was the end of my most recent Amtrak journey.
These days catching a 800-series Amtrak P40 working a long distance train is a rare find! I was delighted to make a few photos of this antique when we arrived at Houston, having traveled behind it from New Orleans.
Amtrak 45 and 837 lead train number 1, the Sunset Limited at Houston, Texas.
The Sunset at night. Notice the classic private cars to the left of Amtrak. Tom Kline reports that these are owned by Patrick Henry who runs this company h ttp://www.phcp.com/index.html The cars are named for Patrick’s dad and mom.
I made these photos with my FujiFilm XT1 with 12mm Zeiss Touit set at ISO 3200.
Shutter speed was about 1/13thof a second.
I made some minor adjustments to shadow and highlight detail in post processing.