Call it a ‘Retro-Metro’. The Rome metro trains are still covered in graffiti. How 1980s is that?
I made these views using my Lumix LX7 on my visit to Rome with Honer Travers in September 2017.
I’d set the ISO at 200 and 250, and the white balance to ‘auto’, which I’ve found from experience photographing subways tends to yield some of the most effective photographs.
My Lumix is handy for underground railway photography because it’s compact, lightweight, minimally obtrusive, and has a very fast (f1.4) Leica lens that yield sharp images wide open.
It was a bright morning last week when I exposed this view of a Trenitalia double-deck suburban train approaching its station stop at Rome Trastevere en route to Roma Termini (Rome’s main station).
I worked with my FujiFilm XT1 with 90mm f2.0 lens for this photo.
Exposed using a FujiFilm XT1 fitted with a Fujinon f2.0 90mm lens.
Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve been making regular use of this camera/lens combination.
I have four lens for my FujiFilm XT1; 12/27/90mm fixed focal length (prime) lenses, plus an 18-135mm zoom lens. Lately the 27 and 90mm primes have been the most useful.
Why not use the zoom lens more? Here’s three reasons:
1) The 18-135mm zoom not as fast as the primes. My 90mm f2 is 2.5/3 stops faster that the 18-135mm.
2) The 18-135mm zoom isn’t as sharp.
3) I find that the discipline of working with a fixed focal length lenses lends to stronger images. This is an abstract notion, but often seems to be true.
Over the years I’ve gone back and forth between a preference for zooms over primes. It’s the toss up of convenience over image quality. There’s no one ‘right’ solution. But when I look back at my images that I prize the most, many of them have been exposed using prime glass.
Tracking the Light Posts Everyday.
