Western Railroad Discussion > Cal Northern In Davis

I was at Davis at sunset when I heard the great sounds of horns out on the West Valley line coming closer. Not sure what this job is called, but it handles the interchange with the UP at Davis. After they came off the West Valley line they dropped their cars at the interchange just east of the station. I believe they tie down their power a mile or so down the West Valley line from the wye, so I drove down there looking for someplace with some light. I managed to find a parking garage that was putting some light on the tracks so I climbed up to the third floor where there was this decent angle to catch the train with a bit of light. Some folks have asked me about night photography which I am interested in so while I'm no expert I thought I would outline the process I follow. I use a Nikon D600 with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I shoot in manual, focus manually, RAW format, and then process the file with Nikon's free software Capture NX-D. 

So as I ran up the stairs of the garage I could hear the engine blowing as it rumbled down the wye so I turned on the camera and made sure I was at the right settings. F1.8, shutter at 1/320 because they weren't moving too fast, and ISO 4500. High frames per second setting on the shooting dial. As I walked toward the back of the garage, so I would have as much of the garage light in the shot, I turned on the camera live view and zoomed in and focused on a car about 60 feet away. When I got to the garage wall over the tracks the engine was just about to come through the crossing next to the garage. I had about ten seconds before they would be past me. I snapped a shot and hit the play button to check it. It was very blurry--I had left the autofocus on by accident and it had lost focus. So I hit live view, focused, and thrust the camera outside the garage and blazed away. It can be good to shoot a lot of frames as some types of lights will cycle such that you get wildly different images depending on whether they are on or off when the shutter opens--even though this effect is imperceptible to the naked eye.   

So here are some pictures of the image as I processed the file.
#1 is the RAW file no processing. F1.8, 1/320, ISO 4500. 

#2 as first step I open the levels and curves tool and boost the curve in the highlights and midtones and pull down the darker tones a very tiny amount. I have inset a screen shot of the curve just to show it. You can see the blue in the sky, it wasn't long after sunset and while dark, there was still a blue color up there. This gets really noisy I find.  

#3 I moved the white balance towards the yellow to warm things up and also opened the LCH tool and selected the Chroma setting and boosted the reds to bring out the red on the CFNR genset, also some of the red light from the xing signals. I also added some saturation for the warmth thing, too
 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/19 22:51 by phthithu.

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#4 I added some shadow protection which is nice around the engine but brings up the blue in the sky too and the noise there. 
#5 To get tone down that blue sky I open back up the levels and curves and move the black point over from 0 to 15. This makes the darker tones turn black. You can see where a lot of the details around the engine in #4 disappear into shadow. I also added a bit of contrast slider action at same time. I also tried turning down the shadow protection. 
#6 So #5 was a bit dark so I in this one I moved the black point to 7 and then used the contrast slider so that there was just the slightest bit of color still in the sky but you couldn't see noise 
 

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Final: As a last step I added 1/2 step of exposure compensation, turned off most of the shadow protection, turned off the contrast, and watching the sky moved the black point until it went nearly black. Ended up being at 24. Widened the chroma boost which warmed up the lights on the engine a bit more as there's more yellow being boosted. 

  



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/19 23:07 by phthithu.

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Way too much work. I'll just send all my shots to you to enhance for me:)

I think if I tried it with all those alterations, it would not go well.

Gary

Thank you very, very much for this post.  Also, it helps that your camera is full frame.   Very instructive, thanks again!

 

SN711, Yeah it can be a pain although you can also save the settings and just bring them up with one click. Or do one photo from a shoot, and then copy those adjustments to the rest. The levels and curves thing is the most helpful especially moving over the black point and really could just go with that adjustment and be happy along with tweaking the white balance. 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/19 00:55 by phthithu.

Very interesting and informative, but I think that I will just stick to daytime photography!  LOL!

Wow. So cool. Thanks for walking us through the steps. Great end result.

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Wow- very generous of you to walk us through your process so completely. I will be copying it and referring to it often!
Thank you!
SR
(Grasshopper)

BoilingMan Wrote:
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> Wow- very generous of you to walk us through your
> process so completely. I will be copying it and
> referring to it often!
> Thank you!
> SR
> (Grasshopper)

LOL. Well this is more of an idiot's guide to the idiot's way of doing this with the idiot in both cases being moi. But this is how to do it with basic free processing software and get workable outcomes. I think with some of the standard processing softwares like photoshop and lightroom there should be good noise reduction tools that could really be amazing. 

Thanks for the description of the photographer's secrets.

Interesting to note that Nikon's literature expects all images to be post processed.

TCnR Wrote:
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> Thanks for the description of the photographer's
> secrets.
>
> Interesting to note that Nikon's literature
> expects all images to be post processed.

Do they say that? It's funny, I like the way all my pictures look on the camera's LCD display. They never look that nice on my computer screen--when you shoot in JPEG--and so that's why I find I have to process them to get them to look the way they did on the LCD screen. 

TCnR Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for the description of the photographer's
> secrets.
>
> Interesting to note that Nikon's literature
> expects all images to be post processed.

Now, now....
I use Lightroom for post-shooting to get things more to my liking, and it's aptly named- very much like going into the darkroom with a fistfull of negs.  See, here's the thing: I can pretty much guarantee that a fair % of what you love about Stein's (or for that matter, Ansel Adam's) work was achieved in the darkroom.  It's great having a great camera, but often- it's only the jumping off point...
Tools is tools.
SR
 

Good info! I really appreciate your photos and the tutorial for those of use with less experience shooting at night. 

James Nelson
Thornton, CO
www.flickr.com/mojaveflyer

It’s amazing what is possible with digital photography nowadays. Your photos are outstanding. Thank you for the info and explanation.

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