Photo of the Week: #006

By
Three unknown BNSF units are leading a coal train westbound along the Clark Fork River upstream of Paradise, MT.  This route is the flat route that BNSF and MRL trains can take between Missoula and Paradise.  The gentle grades and wide curves make this route the preferred track for loaded trains headed to the West Coast.


Composition-wise, I love this photo.  The river, the bridge, the trees, and the low clouds hanging in the cold air make this scene one of the best along the route.  However, there is one glaring problem with the photograph, the trains are slightly blurred!  Ideally, I want a sharp photograph that freezes the action.  Fortunately, some editing allowed me to salvage this image into something usable.

The settings for this photograph were: f/5, ISO 100, and an f/stop of 1/30th of a second.  The lens used here is a Nikon 70-300mm f/4-5.6G positioned at 70mm  No auto-focus and no image stabilization makes this lens cheap and light, but optically it isn't the best, as can be seen with the chromatic aberration in the trees. This has been a problem for me with this lens quite often, which prompted me to buy a Samyang 85mm f/1.4 lens for Nikon.  While it is a third-party lens, optically it is far superior to my Nikon zoom lens.

If I were to do this image over, I would go with a faster shutter speed and bump my ISO up to 400 or 640.  In my quest for a clean, sharp image, I picked up a habit from my landscape work by setting the ISO to 100, which is ideal, and f/stop to something above f/4 so that I can have as much of the scene in focus as possible.  Since landscapes don't move very much or very fast, I can use any shutter speed that I wish.  Obviously I underestimated the speed of the train, and so next time I will compensate.

This time of year it's also important to note that there's very little light.  Even at solar noon, this scene was in the shade.  All these trees get only about 1 hour of light per day in the winter, most of that being ambient light.  When the region gets some permanent snow (its been dry), I plan to go back with my new lens and try this again, but with a larger aperture, higher ISO, and a shutterspeed of at least 1/100th of a second.