Correct shutter speed for railway photography

[GrahamR]

Hi all,

Taking railway photography recently.

Trying to get a balance between fast shutter speed and depth of field.

I normally use a 28-75mm f2.8 Minolta lens.

For my mainline railway, I normally use a shutter of 800th sec, but with a 100asa tranny and sunny conditions, is only giving me betwewen f3.5-4.5 normally.

Is this going to be ok for pics, of will depth be rubbish. Normally shooting at infinaty on lens.


Any help.


Graham

[Gordon_McGeachie]

Hi all,

Taking railway photography recently.

Trying to get a balance between fast shutter speed and depth of field.

I normally use a 28-75mm f2.8 Minolta lens.

For my mainline railway, I normally use a shutter of 800th sec, but with a 100asa tranny and sunny conditions, is only giving me betwewen f3.5-4.5 normally.

Is this going to be ok for pics, of will depth be rubbish. Normally shooting at infinaty on lens.


Any help.


Graham

The shutter speed you use is dependant on how good your panning skills are.

Use a slower speed to emphasise movement. Just takes practice.Try to get speeds around 1/125 and 1/250 or slower if feeling brave.

[beejaybee]

The shutter speed you use is dependant on how good your panning skills are.

True. Practise makes perfect, or at least results get better as you get used to the technique.

Try to get speeds around 1/125 and 1/250 or slower if feeling brave.

The atmosphere from a panned shot comes from the blurred background rather than from the sharpness of the moving target. There will be some blurring in any case as the rate of panning required to "fix" an extended target varies with the position of the target (e.g. the loco will require to be panned at a different rate to the first carriage) and also during the exposure. IMO a panned shot with a bit of "shutter shake" is fine. Try going as slow as 1/30 with a 75mm lens. 1/125 is probably not going to be enough to blur the background enough to get the effect you want. Take lots of shots as no-one gets much over 25% acceptable results when panning.

BTW with a focal plane shutter the effect depends on which way you're panning. If you have a shutter which runs horizontally then the panning effect will be markedly different if you're tracking left-to-right as opposed to tracking right-to-left. If the shutter runs vertically then you will find that verticals in the background tend to lean. This is because the shutter takes a finite time to open, and close again.

For my mainline railway, I normally use a shutter of 800th sec, but with a 100asa tranny and sunny conditions, is only giving me betwewen f3.5-4.5 normally.

Is this going to be ok for pics, of will depth be rubbish. Normally shooting at infinaty on lens.

How close are you going to get? If you're far enough away to get most of a train in the frame on a 75mm lens then I doubt DoF is going to be a significant problem. If you're close enough to have a DoF problem when zoomed out wide, count your toes after the train has passed, you might find that some have been chopped off by the wheels...

If you're really worried then faster film and/or push processing would help.

However I'd pre-focus on the (nearer) rail at the point where you intend to take the photo rather than simply setting to infinity.

[RovingMike]

Take a look in all the great railway books. The shots that are most exciting are those that show movement and 1/800 will kill that. I go with those that say as slow as possible, then DOF is no problem.