I made a series of exposures of Conway Scenic’s May 22nd special Railfan Photographer’s Mountaineer at Crawford, NH.

In these views the locomotives were fighting the light with the sun nearly behind the subject at a relatively high angle in the sky.

For this discussion, I underexposed the scene, which allowed me to retain detail in the sky and other highlight areas.

By importing the camera NEF RAW file into Lightroom I was able to make adjustments to the shadows and highlight areas to compensate for the undesirable effects of underexposure while retaining adequate detail across the exposure range.

This is in part possible because of Nikon Z6’s full-frame sensor with an enormous dynamic range.

Of the three views: The top is the uncorrected NEF file scaled for internet. The bottom two are screen shots of the Lightroom work window to show how I implemented changes to the NEF file before scaling for internet presentation.

Tracking the Light Posts Every Day!