To paraphrase Mr Toad. “There is nothing quite so awesome as messing around in steam.” We love steam trains. Old, new, big, small – we don’t care. To be perfectly honest we don’t even know much about trains. We just know that these huge steam breathing, snarling and grunting creatures, that have a life of their own, make stunning photographs. In this article we’d like to share a few tips on how to photograph steam trains to get great images. (Of course we love all things steam – see our Steam, Smoke and Noise post.)

When we first started photographing steam trains we were rather disappointed with our results. The incredible steam beast that was so full of life on the track had been reduced to a dull, lifeless, public transport vehicle. We see the same issue in so many photographers’ images. We would like to show you how we tackled the problems, to create images that do these beautiful machines, and their keepers, justice.

Find your unique angle

What do you want your image to say about the train? For us it is showing the engine as a living entity, so we look for angles that are unusual but still show the train as living and breathing. We spend a lot of time with the engine at the station wandering around getting all sorts of angles. When we photograph moving trains we tend to scout the area for an interesting (sympathetic to the type of train) background first and then look for our position to photograph from. We tend to treat moving steam train images like a landscape photograph. If you can remove the train from the scene and still have a stunning shot then you’re onto a winner.

When thinking about how to photograph steam trains, one of the things we always advise, is to look for angles that not everyone else does. Go high, go low, go inside, put your camera under the train if it’s not moving and safe to do so. Just don’t be boring.

The decisive moment

As the train is not moving for most of our images we try to show the movement by including steam as much as possible. While the train is waiting in the station we usually are able to create images with a small amount of steam; however the perfect steam comes just as the train starts to move. Clouds of steam and smoke billow out. This has 3 functions. Firstly it gives the train ‘life’. Secondly it hides distracting background details (cars in the carpark, hoarding board advertising etc) and lastly it gives the image a wonderful impressionist look with swirling clouds of white and the front of the engine emerging from it. You can also try panning to capture the movement.

Details, details, details

A steam train is filled with interesting details but don’t get so carried way that you forget your composition. Sometimes it can be helpful to look at the details through your camera but un-focus the camera so you just see the blurry shapes. This helps to concentrate your brain on the relationship between shapes and you will fin your composition improves. If you have an auto-focus lens you can usually switch to manual focus to do this. If you can’t then just focus on something far away and don’t touch the focus button until you’re ready to shoot.

Ask and you might receive

People who run steam trains are usually very proud of their engines, and rightly so as they put a lot of work into them. If you ask politely they are often willing to let you photograph areas of the train that the public don’t normally get to see. Remember not to get in the way and send them some images afterwards.

Exposure

One of the issues with trains in bright sunny conditions is the high contrast in the scene. We tend to expose for the highlights most of the time as the shadow detail is easier to retrieve in developing in Lightroom or Photoshop Raw converters.

Leaving your camera set to auto is great if you are constantly switching from sun to shade and don’t have time to check the exposure as you could miss an important image. However if you do this be careful that the camera isn’t being fooled and over- or under-exposing. Ally always shoots on manual. I (Tim) occasionally shoot aperture priority but if I do I always keep an eye on my exposure and use the exposure compensation button if I need it.

Develop your images to create your vision

Don’t forget that a large part of the image creation process is developing your images. Were not talking about just taking the image and converting it from Raw to jpg. We’re talking about getting your image back to how you envisaged it when you shot it.

In the raw file converter:

• Correct your exposure. Make it look like you saw it.
• Sort out your colour (white) balance. ‘Correct’ is not always ‘right’. Make it look like you envisaged it. Warm it up, cool it down. Whatever works for your image.
• Increase or decrease the vibrance / saturation as needed.
• Add micro-contrast using the clarity slider.
• Try it in black and white.

All the above are done to movies. This is called Colour Grading. Different movies have different ‘looks’ to complement the scenes for example The Matrix series had a very green tinge. Some movies very contrasty or orange. Nothing is right or wrong.

Once you have created your ‘vision’ with the basic settings, save it as a preset so you can use it on the other images in that set. Most developing software, be it Photoshop Raw file converter, Affinity Photo, Lightroom or other has the ability to save and reuse Raw settings.

On an individual image basis go in and use the adjustment tools on the image to dodge, burn, increase or decrease contrast and vibrancy. Remember all the great photographers used dodge and burn techniques. From Ansel Adams’ landscapes through to Dorothea Lang’s migrant worker images.

Filters

When you are learning about how to photograph steam trains, filters can be a great help. If you are having trouble with the contrast between the sky and the dark of the train details, try adding a graduated ND filter.

To get rid of reflections and increase the saturation in vegetation try using a polarising filter.

As always the most important part of the whole process is to thoroughly enjoy your photography.

About the Umgeni Steam Railway (Inchanga Choo Choo)

All of the images you see in this article were photographed in South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal at the Kloof railway station. The train that runs here is the Inchanga Choo Choo that is part of the Umgeni Steam Railway (USR). The USR is a volunteer run organisation dedicated to preserving these railways in South Africa. The Inchanga Choo Choo runs on the last Sunday of every month generally. It is a lovely ride from Kloof to Inchanga (a tiny village approx half an hour’s ride away). It has a craft market at Inchanga and people often take a picnic. It’s a perfect way to experience the atmosphere of a traditional steam locomotive. It is a favourite of young and old alike. Tickets sell out fast in advance!

Thanks!

Many thanks to the Inchanga staff, particularly to Andre the driver, for allowing us to photograph inside the engine cab. We apologise to both the fireman and engineer, in whose way we inadvertently got in. For an awesome photographic experience we cannot recommend this highly enough

The post How to photograph steam trains appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Aperture is one of the ways we control how much light gets to the film or sensor but it is is just so much more useful than that. In this article we will look at how it affects the image in so many other ways. Of course, aperture also enables lots of creative ideas to be realised. Come with us on an enjoyable journey down the exposure rabbit hole while we explain what aperture is, and how you can change your camera settings to create exceptional travel images.

The basics of aperture

The hole that changes size

Aperture is the hole in the lens that gets bigger and smaller depending on your settings. The bigger the hole, the more light that comes through onto the film or sensor. The hole can get bigger or smaller because it is made up of a number of blades.

Wide aperture means the hole is big (more light enters).

Small aperture means the hole is small (less light enters).

Different lenses have different numbers of blades. Some are straight and some are curved.

The number of blades (and if they are straight or curved) will affect how the out of focus areas look. The quality of the out of focus area is known a bokeh.

What are f-stops?

The light that comes through the aperture is measured in f-stops. Each full f-stop is double (or half) the light of the next stop. So f.5.6 allows double the light through than f8. f16 allows half the light of f11.

The lenses are usually advertised with the maximum aperture value so for example you might have a zoom lens that says 24mm-70mm f4 – f4 being the widest aperture of that lens. The bigger the maximum aperture, the more light can come in and the lower light you are able to photograph in. Of course larger maximum apertures come at a price. A wide aperture lens is usually heavier and more expensive than a smaller aperture.

All lenses are different but this lens shows the f-stop of 2. The number after that is the lenses focal length.

Pro tip

If you want really sharp images, shoot in the f5.6 to f11 range. Not to get too technical but less expensive lenses are corrected for sharpness better in the middle than at the edges. So why not shoot with very small apertures? Well the light is diffracted by the edge of the aperture blades causing the image to be less sharp.

A prime lens (not zoom) will usually be sharper than a zoom lens.

What is the difference between a “pro” lens and the kit lens that came with my camera body. Is it the aperture?

Generally yes. The aperture is usually wider on the pro lens.

Other factors also affect come into play.

• The kit lens is often made of plastic, whereas the professional lens needs to take a beating and so is usually made of metal.
• The more expensive pro lens probably has better correction for colour fringing – chromatic aberration.
• While the kit lens that comes with the camera usually has very good middle sharpness at most apertures, the images are not so sharp in the corners and especially so at wider apertures.

Aperture can be controlled from either the lens or in the camera

Aperture also affects focus

The wider the aperture you use, the narrower the depth of field. This means that out of focus areas will be more out of focus which allows you to isolate subjects away from their background

The smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field

As a gross generalisation, people photography works well with wide apertures where you want to isolate the person from the background, whereas landscape photography works well with small apertures where you want everything in focus from foreground to infinity.

Drag the slider to see the difference between f4 and f16

For the left image of Ally, I used a larger aperture f4. Doing this ensured that the background is thrown totally out of focus.

For the right image I used a small aperture f16 so the background is more in focus and is less visually pleasing.

So how does it work – The Tecky Geeky stuff

This diagram shows how bigger apertures make the out-of-focus areas more blurry

The light comes from the scene, goes through the lens and the wide aperture and focuses to a point on the film or sensor plane.

The light comes from the scene, goes through the lens but is out of focus. The focus point is in front of the film or sensor plane. As the aperture is very big, the out of focus area called the circle of confusion will be big too. Lots of blur.

The light comes from the scene, goes through the lens but is out of focus. The focus point is in front of the film or sensor plane. As the aperture is very small, the out of focus area will be small too. Much less blur.

How does this affect travel photography then?

Lets look at some images

Ally shot this steam train handle glow, with a large or wide aperture (f2.8) to isolate the handle from the details in the steam.

Tim shot the Croatia “hole in the wall” using a small aperture, to get everything in focus from foreground to infinity.

So finally lets break some rules!

Once you are comfortable following the ‘rules’ of aperture it will then be time to break them. Maybe try photographing a wide vista landscape wide open to isolate the horizon or a foreground tree. Try shooting a portrait with a busy background with a small aperture to get all in focus. The more you experiment, the more you will learn so keep trying new techniques.

Aperture seems such a mine-field; however armed with the knowledge we looked at in this article you should be able to improve your technique, and create some awesome photographs.

The post What is aperture – why it is important to travel photography appeared first on ImageExplorers.

Bokeh! Got to be one of the weirdest terms in photography It is only beaten by scheimpflug (ability to get your focus plane to any angle you like on a large format camera) and mackie line (helps make your film images sharper by developing the edges more). But more to the point. What is Bokeh and why do we love it.

When looking at lens reviews you might come across the reviewer talking about the ‘buttery soft’, ‘swirly’ or even ‘donut’ bokeh. In this article we’d like to explain about it and why you might need to be interested in it – or not, for your travel photography.

Don’t stress the Bokeh stuff

Bokeh (pronounced BOH kay) is the aesthetic quality of the blur in the out-of-focus areas of your images. The narrower the depth of field (bigger the aperture), the more out of focus areas you get. So Bokeh being an aesthetic quality means that it is subjective and nothing is right or wrong. This is a big relief as it means we don’t have to get bokeh ‘right’, just ‘how we want it’. Phew….

Types of bokeh

Bokeh can be described in all sorts of creative ways so here are some of the more popular adjectives that people use to describe it:

• buttery
• donut
• swirly
• grainy
• circular or oval
• hexagonal

The type of bokeh and the smoothness of it, is a product of the construction of the lens. Both glass and the aperture blades will have an effect on the bokeh. The round look on the previous photograph is down to the blades (10) on the Leica Summicron lens I was using. More blades give you rounder out-of-focus highlights. Round blades will compensate for less blades to give more round highlights.

A mirror lens that uses mirrors rather than glass will give you extreme donut highlights.

Image with small aperture so no noticeable bokeh

When the same image is defocused the soft buttery bokeh in the out-of-focus areas complement the hexagonal bokeh highlights

What and how Bokeh does the job

So bokeh is the quality of the out of focus area. The out-of-focus bit can add so much to an image, but one of its main ‘jobs’ is to make the background appear separate from sharp foreground subjects. This could be to separate the person you photographed from a busy background, or to create a sense of depth in a cityscape or landscape. We use this technique a lot in our night photography as it allows us to create beautiful out-of-focus highlights.

Ally used an aperture of f8 on these mushrooms in Wivenhoe woods, Essex to isolate the subject while still keeping them in focus

Ally used an aperture of f4 on her portrait of Idris inside Truth Coffee in Cape Town, S Africa

On the image above, the out-of-focus lights and metals of all the steam punk paraphernalia give a beautiful backdrop to her portrait of Idris at Truth Coffee … is it the best coffee shop in the world!

To create more out-of-focus areas you need to have your subject a reasonable distance from the background and then use a wide aperture on your lens. (The smaller the aperture number, the wider the aperture is eg, f16 is a small aperture while f2.8 is wide.)

Lastly

Bokeh is a fashionable word at the moment. Sometimes people pour over images, drooling over the bokeh or criticising it at the expense of the content of the image. It is not nearly as important as lens reviewers would have you believe. The most important thing is the image – not the quality of the out-of-focus areas.

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The light meter in your camera is a very useful tool, but there are times when you need to know that it’s actually lying to you. So how you can overcome it? Exposure compensation to the rescue.

Firstly, let’s look at what the camera light meter sees. The light meter shows a scene as being correct when it averages to perfect grey. Great for most images but it means that if you’re trying to photograph a white polar bear in snow your camera will give you the perfect exposure reading to make the snow and bear a mid-grey. This is a perfect time for exposure compensation. By adding 1, 2 or even 3 stops of light we can make the grey go white and compensate for the camera’s incorrect exposure. Exactly the opposite for a black cat sitting on a black mat. We need to give the camera less light than it thinks it needs so that the cat will look black and not come out grey.

“But I don’t photograph polar bears and my cat is already grey”, I hear you cry!

Okay, so how about a sunset or sunrise? All that sun shining directly into the lens as well as a dark foreground, can fool the camera into giving you an exposure that results in an image which doesn’t look like you envisaged it.

Without exposure compensation (the camera’s ‘correct’ exposure), on this image of shipwreck in Cyprus, the sky looks too light

By using exposure compensation on the shipwreck in Cyprus we can make the sky more pleasing, but everything else is too dark, but we then use dodge and burn techniques to correct this. See image at end of post.

How about the photograph of your loved one standing on a beach in the shade of a palm tree? The camera looks at the scene and makes its exposure decision based on the sunny background so the small person in shade in the front is too dark but the bright sunny background is perfectly exposed.

Correct exposure doesn’t always mean a pleasing image

So how do we fix this?

Well, if you’re photographing in manual mode, you can just adjust your shutter, aperture or ISO a few stops to compensate for this. If you are photographing in an auto mode like aperture or shutter priority, or even program mode, then most cameras have an exposure compensation button.  This allows you to over or underexpose a scene to compensate for the camera’s light meter.

So far so good but sometimes you want the perfect exposure for the bright sunset so the sky looks beautiful. Not only that but you also want the dark foreground to look bright and vibrant too.

Well there are various ways you can have your cake and eat it.

Option 1 – Bracketing

This means taking 2 or 3 (or more) images of exactly the same shot with different exposures. Most cameras have a bracketing function built in, where it will take a number of shots, a number of stops over and under your original choice of exposure.

So what next? You open Photoshop and this is where the magic happens! Photoshop will allow you to merge these multiple images into an HDR file so you can have details in the dark as well as light areas.

Using 2 images of different exposures (circled in red) to create a third HDR image

Although one can do this in Photoshop, (you get there by selecting multiple images in Bridge and choosing Merge to HDR from the tools and Photoshop sub-menu), I would recommend using a different piece of software. Aurora HDR 2018 seems to give much more pleasing results than Photoshop.

Option 2 – Dodge and Burn

Use an image that shows the most detail in both areas. Lighten the darker areas with either a dodge tool in Photoshop or an adjustment brush in Raw (much better quality). Now darken the light areas with a burn brush in Photoshop or an adjustment brush in Raw. See our before and after tutorial of Queen Carolines Temple in Hyde park.

Similar image from shipwreck set –  with a bit of dodging and burning in Photoshop Raw to bring the ship and rock details to life

Option 3 – Shadows/Highlights

In Photoshop there is an adjustment setting in the adjustment menu called the Shadows/Highlights. This amazing adjustment allows you to lighten the darker areas and darken the light areas of an image. (You can achieve a similar result in Raw with the Shadow and Highlights sliders. You will also need to up the Saturation and Contrast a bit.)

Correct exposure doesn’t always mean a pleasing image – image copyright Adobe

Using the Shadows/Highlights tool as a form of Exposure Compensation

Finally, if your images show too much detail in the shadows and highlights area there are numerous ways of increasing contrast to get more “punch” but a quick trick is to use the Dehaze tool in Photoshop Raw. See a video tutorial here and our favourite Photoshop shortcuts here.

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