Diesel Electric Porn

Let me set the scene. A sunny Sunday afternoon in early April, England. Our nine year old boy is out skateboarding (about which, another time…). Sweetheart pregnant wife acting very hormonal, issuing clear signals to stay back at least ten yards. So I grabbed my camera bag, and headed out to muck around taking some landscape shots, since the sunset was only two hours away. Sadly, we live in one of the least photogenic parts of England. Stamford’s a pretty town, but I wanted some dramatic countryside, which we don’t have, and with limited time available it was just beyond me, that afternoon. So I gave in to my small boy instincts, and headed off to the main London to Edinburgh railway line – words that thrilled me when I was a kid, gr0wing up near the railway tracks in Somerset – to try and take a certain type of picture.

Namely, a long exposure, train streaking by, creating a long colourful blur. It wasn’t as easy as I thought:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 14mm, 1/15 sec at f22, ISO 200, no flash. I shot in Aperture priority (my favourite – I really haven’t learnt any other way properly yet), stuck it on a tripod, used the wide angle Sigma, and used a really small aperture and a low ISO to force a slow shutter speed. But this picture was about my tenth try, and I was still cocking it up…

It was harder than I thought. I was either missing the train completely, or the long exposure completely blew out the sky. I had to ether crop them in tight to lose as much of the sky as possible, as per the one below, or I’d have to take a few sky shots and paste them in afterwards. Either way, I wasn’t getting the results I wanted:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/4 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. I was kind of getting there, but to be frank it was more enjoyable as a peaceful couple of hours, rather than as a fulfilling photo shoot. And I had big fast trains whizzing by, which – as has been covered elsewhere in this blog – appeals to me, in the same way that big ships, planes and even big shiny lorries do. I guess I just like big machines.

Being trackside like this isn’t encouraged in our modern British terrorist-conscious, suicide-story, vandalist culture. In other words, in the eyes of the train drivers I was more likely to be a troublemaker or a suicidal fortysomething, than the rather geeky, but completely relaxed (and indeed very cool) Andy Dad which Devon knows me as. I was simply there to get some fresh air and get some practice in on the camera, but I’m sure I gave the drivers a few nervous moments.

Mind you, shooting wide angle means you need to get up close, so the nervous moments weren’t exclusive to train drivers. Yikes:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/6 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. This was a big ugly freight train, without any trucks – just the engine. He gave me the full siren (and probably the finger) as he went past. The wind rocked the tripod, which is why the ‘196′ sgn on the left is a bit blurry. This one was riding on the ‘local’ track, right at the edge of the four-line tracks. But you see, I’m comfortable close to trains. Mark (big bro) and I spent much of our youth literally lying on the railway tracks on the main South Western line from Bristol down to Taunton. Our neck of the woods, just north of Bridgwater station, was on a very, very long straight, and you could see the trains coming for miles. Just like the stretch I was on here (between Peterborough and Grantham) – straight as an arrow, and flat. As kids, we’d spend hours playing – I am ashamed to admit – on the main railway lines. If you put your ear to the track, you could hear the tiny vibration noises – wiry tuning-fork sounds that sounded like the pulse missiles on Star Trek – that trains were making miles up the track. Trains that were thundering towards us at high speed, of course, but trains that we could see coming, thanks to their bright yellow danger fronts, for at least five minutes before they reached us. Our parents never knew, of course, but they do now. Never once did we feel in danger, just excited. We weren’t vandals. We were just young kids with – if memory serves me right – eternal summers and endless hot days to while away with nothing better to do than to watch the giant diesel trains thunder by just feet away. But in truth, there was nothing that we would rather have been doing. And we never once got stopped by British Railway trackside marshals.

Any road, forty years later I had got better at the camera thing, having shot a few skies for post-production, and I finally got a decent photograph of one of the big high-speed express trains headed at 125mph for London:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/6 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. VERY over-cooked on the computer afterwards, that’s a sky which I shot beforehand, imported hurriedly and very amateurishly into this image. It’s bad HDR, highly over-saturated, garish, and a bit of a shambles… But it’s more like the shot I had in mind when I went out that day. By this time I had the camera on Continuous High mode, which gave me 14 shots of this particular train speeding by. I picked this one because of the reds and the blues…

But I wanted one more. This time, I packed the tripod away, climbed back up out of the railway cutting, and went to another of the most dangerous places possible – the level crossing on a country lane nearby. These places are fantastically scary: even though the barriers may be up, I’m sure I’m not the only one who always zips over level crossings a bit quicker than necessary, grimacing in anticipation of a 300,000-ton express train side-swipe…

And as the sun was setting, still with my trusty Sigma wide-angle lens, and crouched down the wrong side of the level crossing as the barriers came down, I got the best picture of the day - this is more or less straight out of the lens:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/2500 sec at f6.3, ISO 800, hand held no flash. No blur, lightning fast shutter speed, high ISO, hand held. The complete opposite of what I’d been taking all afternoon, but the light hitting the trains from the setting sun was so crisp, and the Sigma was exposing the track and the sky together so nicely (thanks to the D300’s excellent metering system), I thought I’d try and take a Rail Enthusiast double page spread. Trainspotters, feel free to email me for the full diesel electric porn, high resolution version.

But yes, it’s just a train, and to some of my more urbane, fashionable friends – it’s been nice knowing you