Photo of the Week #008

Crawling into Rapid City, a train headed by Rapid City Pierre and Eastern (RCPE) units: 3456, 3462, 3428, and 3424 (SD40-2's) start off 2019 with a train of bentonite clay and boxcars full of industrial products from the Belle Fourche area. The trestle in this scene crosses Rapid Creek.

Sometimes photographing a train requires a lot of thought and an eye on composition, other times the scene is obvious.  In this case, it took all of about 30 seconds to figure out the best angle for this train as I parked the car in a bank parking lot.  This RCPE train came from Belle Fourche starting at about 9:30 in the morning and I had caught up to the train just North of St. Onge.  New Year's day, 2019, was shaping up to be one of those perfect days for photography. The previous two days saw a blizzard and several inches of fresh powder, driven hard by the wind and icy-cold from the frigid temperatures.  While several scenes presented themselves in the ensuing miles, this particular scene was just begging to be photographed.

Usually, trains are photographed on this bridge headed the other direction, but it's far less common to catch a train entering the city on this trestle, perhaps because doing so requires keeping an ear on the scanner for half a morning.  But with several days of vacation and a glorious winter in the Black Hills, everything seemed to line up right.  As I sat on a rock waiting for the train to crawl its way into town, all these thoughts were running through my head. The photograph was easy, the preparation was the hard part.

The sun, despite being at solar noon, was low in the sky, creating intense cross lighting. The washed out sky needed more intensity, so this was a perfect situation for my polarizing filter.  This type of camera filter creates intense skies when used properly, but darkens the image by 0.5-1.5 stops, doubling the shutter time necessary for proper exposure.  Because of this, I can't use a polarizer in the darkness of western Montana.  However, in South Dakota the intense sun here allowed, and even necessitated, the use of a filter.

After what seemed like an eternity, I heard the horn of the train as it approached a grade crossing about 1/4 of a mile down the tracks, and so I pressed "record" on my camcorder and prepared myself for a series of images from my Nikon DSLR.  As the train crawled onto the trestle at 10 miles per hour, The first two photographs were vertical, trees blocking the steel buildings in the back ground and a slight reflection of the train in the bottom of the image.  While that pair were okay, this last shot was what I was waiting for.  I quickly zoomed out on my Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 HSM to the wide end and snapped this shot after quickly stepping down to the weeks which border Rapid Creek.

Honestly, I hadn't been paying attention to my settings, instinctively I adjusted my shutter speed until the light meter was neutral, indicating a slightly dark exposure.  This is my default when shooting on muscle memory because digital sensors hold detail in shadows better than highlights.  Anyways, my settings for this particular image are 17mm, f/5 aperture, 1/500 second shutter speed, and ISO at 100.  The result was a sharp, clean image that perfectly froze the train in the frame.  The only issue?  Some serious sun-glare from the cab of the lead unit.

I guess the thing to be learned from this image is that settings, while important, are often a distraction.  Knowing instinctively what you need to set your camera's functions at is an important skill when trying to photograph a moving train, because missing the shot means you've permanently missed an opportunity that won't come again.

--James Willmus