{"id":43006,"date":"2025-12-05T06:34:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T11:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/?p=43006"},"modified":"2025-12-03T22:41:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T03:41:52","slug":"christmas-lights-with-f1-4-50mm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/christmas-lights-with-f1-4-50mm\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Lights with f1.4 50mm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My next Railroad Photography 101 Class at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania will be held on Saturday Dec 13, 2025 from 9 to 11am. The theme to this class will be working with holiday settings, including how to make better night train photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See: https:\/\/www.eventbrite.com\/e\/railroad-photography-101-fall-session-three-tickets-1897166438889?aff=oddtdtcreator<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To prepare some material for the class, I went over to Strasburg the other night and made photos of Strasburg Rail Road’s holiday lights around the station using a Nikon Z6-III with f1.4 50mm Nikkor Z-series lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the camera firmly mounted on a 3Pod tripod, I took a series of photos varying the lens aperture from f1.4 (widest setting to f8.0) as a test of the lens abilities. I allowed the camera to automatic adjust the exposure using a matrix metering setting. The white balance was set to A1 (‘auto’) and the color profile to SDR (standard).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photos displayed here are converted and scaled directly from the Z6-III’s NEF Raw files without any post processing alterations to composition, color, contrast, exposure or any other visual elements of the photo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a work in progress and in following posts, I will explore changes to holiday-night photo RAW files in post processing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f1.4; 1\/13th of a second.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f2.8; 2\/5th of a second.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f4; 4\/5th of a second.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Nikon Z6-III with Nikkor f1.4 50mm lens set at f8; 2.5 seconds.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If you observe carefully, you may notice that the image exposed at f1.4 has a different color balance and is slightly darker that the others. This likely due to the shorter exposure time and the flickering effect of the LED holiday lights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracking the Light Posts about railroad photography<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My next Railroad Photography 101 Class at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania will be held on Saturday Dec 13, 2025 from 9 to 11am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43013,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6060,10,6108,48],"tags":[7750,8198,7121],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Strasburg_RR_Xmas_Lights_DSC_0033.jpg?fit=2048%2C1365","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BVuC-bbE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43006"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43006"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43016,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43006\/revisions\/43016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/briansolomon.com\/trackingthelight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}