Giant rusted carcasses lay scattered in the field waiting for a second life. These large metal streetcar relics, the property of the Northern Ohio Railway Museum, will soon get their chance at restoration.
| The Rio de Janiero | |
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For past thirty years, this not-for-profit organization has been reviving these historic icons of the trolley era. In those days, electricity powered the 80,000-pound streetcars as they cruised around town transporting people for their daily commute.
The sun was pretty harsh today, and since my camera bag didn’t have a 30-foot reflector to soften the light, I stayed mostly inside with my tripod. Ended up using a small f-stop, f16 to f22 range, to highlight the grainy texture, and because only a tiny amount of light is entering the camera, long exposures are required.
| Long Exposures | |
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This meant using ‘M’ or the dreaded manual mode. Actually, once you rotate the knob to manual, and figure out which dial controls the f-stop, then the camera does the rest of the work.
Crank the f-stop up and you’ll see the exposure times start to lengthen. One, two, five and up to 30 seconds before you have to go to ‘bulb’ mode and use an external cable to control the shutter.
Not wanting to spend all day long doing ‘bulb,’ I confined myself to 10 or 15 second exposures which was plenty long.
For most of the shots, I would also bracket the exposure by moving the dial to -1 EV, 0 and +1 EV. This ensured that the camera was correctly reading the scene for at least one of the shots.
Finally, having exhausted all patience, I left the tripod, returned outside, and clicked a couple handheld shots of with interesting colors.
| Outside Shots | |
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Next up the airshow!
[Excerpted from Photography Insights, Volume 2, by Scott Ober, MD, Copyright © 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]
