In the rosy light of a warm March 2019 evening, I exposed this view of a Portuguese Railways Alfa Pendolino ready to depart Porto Campanha on its scheduled run to Lisbon.
I was working with my FujiFilm XT1 with a 90mm f2.0 prime telephoto. ISO set at 2500; aperture wide open (f 2.0); shutter speed 1/60.
Brian Solomon’s Tracking the Light Posts Daily.
I’m not a fan of cropping.
In general, I object to cropping, especially when executed by someone other than the photographer.
I accept that in the realm of publishing it is a necessary evil, and that with the internet, Facebook and other imaging venues embrace cropping without consequence of how it affects photographs.
Yet, occasionally I find necessary to crop one of my photos.
Last I month I made an image of an Italian ETR 610 Pendolino from the south-end of the station platform at Arth-Goldau, Switzerland. While focused on the impressive looking train, I inadvertently included a portion of a mast on the platform that appears as an out of focus blob at the left of the image.
While I often like to work with selective focus, in my opinion this accident in no way enhanced the photo. Furthermore once playing with the cropping feature in Lightroom, I found that cropping other elements of the line side infrastructure materially improved my photo.
Below are some examples. What do you think?
22 July 2015, I’m whizzing along in ’tilt mode’ on a VR Pendolino heading from Helsinki to Oulu. We’ve just overtaken a freight with a pair of diesels on the move.
Just like Amtrak and Irish Rail, these modern trains have on-board WiFi. So far so good.
Using my Lumix LX7 and new Apple Mac Book I can make, process and download photos faster than ever. Thanks to the WiFi I can up load them to you quicker.
Done are the times of waiting until after a trip to have slides processed and then waiting days, weeks, months to have a slide show with friends before being able to share photos.
Why then, you might ask, did I bring 5 rolls of slides and my old EOS 3 to Finland! Well, there’s another story.
Tracking the Light posts new material every day!
Photographing a tilting train at speed in curves.
My first experience with the Italian Pendolino design was in Switzerland more than 14 years ago when I was researching for my book Bullet Trains—a survey of high-speed trains and railways (published by MBI in 2001).
Here’s an excerpt from my text:
The Pendolino’s tilt system provides a luxurious, smooth ride, on sinuous track. The effect of the tilting is subtle and scarcely noticeable as the train glides a long at speed. The Pendolino has proven a successful export item, and have been ordered by Finnish, Czech, and British railways. The appeal of the Pendolino, and other successful tilting designs, such as the Spanish TALGO and Swedish X2000 is the ability to increase running speeds without a massive investment in new infrastructure.
Since that time, several additional European countries have added Pendolino trains to their fleets. I’ve photographed them in a half dozen countries, most recently in early April this year, in Portugal where they are assigned to premier services between Porto, Lisbon and Faro.
Comboios de Portugal (Portugal’s national railway, known by initials ‘CP’) has ten train-sets which work as Alfa Pendular services.
A challenge when photographing Pendolino trains is catching them mid-tilt. I’ve found one way to capture this is working from the outside of a curve using a long telephoto lens. This is most effective when the front of the train has tilted but the rear remains level with the track structure.
It helps to level the camera with an obvious line-side vertical object such as electrification masts, signals or buildings.
Another technique is to catch the train on the inside of a curve with a wider lens, but still leveling the camera with line-side vertical elements.
Tracking the Light posts new material every morning.
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Tomorrow: Night Photography, Iberian Style.
