Western Railroad Discussion > First Real Attempt At Night Railfanning

I've played around withthe subject before, but never really knew what I was doing, which I still probably don't, only using the "Easy Auto Mode" on my camera last night.
After visiting the activities at the Muskogee, OK Midland Vally freight depot and hearing a nice speech from Mike Condren on the Muskogee railroads, we railfanned Wagoner and went from there to Inola following the Missouri Pacific line from Wagoner, Inola, to Claremore. Pictures to come from there later.
The BNSF action was very busy from Claremore all the way to Tulsa. We stopped at Verdigris for a four train meet between one westbound stack train and three eastbound trains out of Tulsa. He then went to Tiger for a rolling meet then by the time he got into Tulsa there was another eastbound waiting for him to get in at East Tulsa. Anyway, here's most the results...

1) The first eastbound lights up the rails at east Verdigris as the westbound approaches

2) QATGLAC approaches the east end of Verdigris to go in the siding

3) More of the westbound stack train



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/12/13 12:07 by BNSF-6432.

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4) The first eastbound lights up the stack train snaking through

5) Fred blinks across the switch and into the clear

6) The eastbound starts up and rounds the corner

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7) Passing the westbound signals

8&9) Now we move to the west end where the 7107 stack train gets lit up by the second eastbound

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10) Stak train puts on the brights between trains, probably wondering what in the world we are doing

11) Signal arm waits for the next action before the main road gets cut off from the residential area when the next eastbound arrives....

12)...which didn't take long

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13) Finally the Q train gets rolling out in the midnight sky

14) Again we caught up with the train at Catoosa, OK just east of Tiger where he will stay on the main for a rolling meet

15) Passing the fourth eastbound out of Tulsa's Cherokee yard

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16) Both trains cross the road in the middle of the siding as an airplane takes off from Tulsa International

17&18) lotsa red as the gates at the west end of Tiger flash for the westbound

Taken with a tripod and Nikon Coolpix L810 and a tripod at some times

Thanks for looking
BNSF-6432
PQM

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Shooting at night with just available light is lots of fun. "Experience is the best teacher" may be a cornball phrase, but it definitely applies.
All you need do is keep setting up that tripod & keep shooting away. Do a lot of bracketing. You'll soon get the knack of knowing ahead of time
about what exposure you'll need to use for a given situation. Once you get that down, your composition & creativity will grow by leaps & bounds!!

Lance

Yeah--what Lance said PQM. I like what you've done and where you are headed.
Brian Stevens

Need to work on your focus. Turn off the auto focus, focus by hand. Dark scenes aren't handled well by autofocus in a lot of cases. In my experience you can make it work if you put an autofocus point over an edge of something illuminated on one side and shadowed on the other, since the autofocus works on edges like that. But the most reliable method is to do it by hand and let your eye tell you when it is in focus.

Kit Courter
Menefee, CA
LunarLight Photography