Photo of the Week #010

MRL #4318 (SD70ACe) and PRLX 213 (SD75M) lead a local freight into the East end of Missoula Yard late in the afternoon of January 27th, 2019.  Mt Jumbo and Mt Sentinel are seen in the background.

To replace my stolen gear, I recently got a Nikon D7200.  The problem though was not getting a camera, but rather getting a couple of lenses on the cheap.  For $200 I managed to get a couple of old F mount lenses from the 1980's and this was a test shot taken with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AI full manual lens.  Despite being old, the lens is sharp and appears to handle chromatic aberration well.  The colors produced are very slightly warm, but its a pleasant warm.

It took all of about 5 minutes of waiting to get this photograph.  My intention was to go down to the Northern Pacific Depot to photograph various pieces of the structure.  While not as impressive as the Livingston depot 300 miles down the line, it has it's own character and charm.  However, I also had the chance to catch this local coming into the yard from either Garrison or Helena.  At first I could only hear it's horn as it crossed a road about 1/2 mile down the tracks, but then I could see it's headlights as the train crept around the bend at about 10 miles per hour.

Despite the slow speed, I still needed to get into position quickly.  The light was in my favor and no clouds were going to block out the intense afternoon sun, but that also meant that with this old manual lens I needed to select all the setting that I think I would need.  Now, AI lenses not only mount to Nikon cameras, but they can meter light as well.  That's enough to give me a good guess, but without proper calibration, the camera's recommendations were not much better than a guess.  Right before the train was on me, I figured the snow on the mountain was going to make the meter think the train was brighter than it actually was, so I went to a slower shutter speed and viola!  The image above was pretty much the result.  All I had to do in post was bring down the highlights a bit, bring up the shadows slightly, a bit of vibration and a bit of sharpening.

Is this a salable photograph?  No, probably not (unless the MRL decides to shut down in the future).  However, if I can take this kind of photograph on the fly, with a manual lens from the 1970's or 80's, then I expect great results from this pair of primes in the future with time to plan the scenes.