Rail photography at night is one of my favourite areas and here I will show you how I go about taking a shot. To take shot at night you are going to need to do a time exposure to produce a shot that looks any good. This rules out the chance of photographing moving trains. You are going to need a camera with bulb mode to achieve a time exposure and a tripod to keep the camera steady. You will also need a cable release and a lens hood would be advisable.

You want to get yourself a decent tripod that will provide a firm base for your camera, this is to prevent movement which would produce a blurred photo. The other vital piece is a cable release, this allows you to fire the shutter without touching the camera. This is important because if you were holding the shutter down with your finger you are likely to move the camera slightly and produce a blurred shot. One last thing I would advise you use if possible is a lens hood. At night each light source acts like a minature sun and thus you are going to get lens flare. Obviously you wont cut out every one but it should keep flaring to a minimum.

Now we have our camera mounted on the tripod and everything set up you are ready to take a shot. First make sure you have you camera level as wonky shots don’t look good. You want to set your camera to bulb mode and then select an aperture. I usually choose an f stop around the middle about f8-11 to provide a decent depth of field. With the aperture set you are ready to fire away but how long do we need to expose for? That is a question I can’t answer and it will vary according to the aperture you set, the lighting at your location and the speed of the film you use. What you need to do is called bracketing and is vital if you use a film camera. Basically you need to shoot a number of shots. I would do exposures of 10,15, 20, 25, 30 seconds. This is to ensure you have at least one photo with correct exposure. With digital this is much easier as you get instant feedback via the LCD screen so you can tweek it until you get the correct exposure and when you leave you know you have good a good shot unlike film where you are left wondering until you get your prints/slides back.

Night photography isn’t particulary difficult but it just takes a little trial and error and some of the results can be very pleasing. I would suggest you give it a go if you haven’t dabbled in this area so far.

Digital Night Photography

I had planned to write this article after I had edited my intial night photography shots with my digital camera but I forgot about it until I shot some more and it reminded me to write the article. I was very impressed with the results that could be obtained from digitals photos over standard film and here I will explain some of the benefits of using a digital camera for night photography.

As the camera is an SLR you still take photos as you would with a film SLR and this means you need a tripod and cable release to obtain good shots. The biggest improvement with digital over film is bracketing your shots to obtain the correct exposure. With a film camera you estimate an exposure time and then bracket either way a few seconds and hope you get the correct exposure on one of them and hence waste a lot of film. With Digital you don’t have to bracket. First you fire a test shot and afterwards you can review the shot on the LCD screen, from this you can see if it is under or over exposed and adjust the next shot accordingly. This way you arrive at a good exposure quickly as you soon judge how much more or less exposure it needs and when you finish you know you have a good shot and your not left wondering until you prints come back as to whether you got a god shot.

Now we have taken our photos we can start editing the photos, if you look at the first photo this is a shot you are going to be used to seeing. It has a horrible orange cast to the shot from the fluorescent lighting which destroys a lot of the colour in the shot. This can easily be fixed with digital and it is all down to the white balance control, though this feature is only available if you shoot in the RAW format. One click on the photo with the white balance tool and you have the second photo you can see. WOW! What a vast improvement that is!

Is it cheating? Well Yes and No. In the way that the camera has recorded the photo, it is exactly correct and it is our eyes that compensate and see things differently. When I was there the shot did not look anything like the first shot we have here and by altering the white balance for the second shot I now have what I remember the scene to be like at the time. I will continue to edit my shots like this although it is technically wrong it is right in my eyes and the result is a much better one.