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Your photography tips

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xc170

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Following the photo in the Flying Scotsman threat of the two clowns that set up cameras lineside, looking at the setup they're using it reminded me of the old saying "All the gear, no idea", so I've started this thread to share photography tips.

The first thing I noticed, (ignoring choice of location) is the ND grad filter, WHY?

It's a dull, overcast day, using an ND grad is going to reduce light entering the camera meaning upping the ISO to maintain a decent shutter spead to capture a sharp photo of the FS when it passes, this is going to result in a very grainy image.

My tip for situation like this to take a photo exposed for the sky, then a photo of exposed for the train, then blend the two in photoshop, you'll get a much nicer image overall.

A good video tutorial from a YouTube landscape photographer explaining the proccess in a clear way can be seen here, watch part two for the Photoshop proccess...


Over to you guys....

D51MZOqWkAI2ZbB.jpg:large
 
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xc170

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As I said "Ignoring the location", already a thread discussing that element of it.
 

Robin Edwards

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Hi XC, as the individual who cast the assertion that taking images as those shown in your image above smacked of "all the gear, no idea" let me expand slightly.
I'm not a photographer as such but have been taking images including those of railways since the mid seventies. I've got some good equipment but don't use for railways as it's simply not needed imo. I'm not a line-sider and if there's too many people running amok on a platform taking images with their iPad, I'm happy to leave my camera in the bag.
My feedback on these two guys are that they are simply too close to the running lines and would likely get record shots of FS approaching head-on. In my humble opinion, not very pleasing to the eye but each to their own.
The graduation filters are pretty old-school in my book as they used to be fairly commonplace when using film rather than digital and offer a graduated exposure effect to darken the brighter sky or similarly, brighten the darker foreground of say a locomotive which would be darker and offer more shadow. Personally, I don't bother with filters and haven't done for years since propriety software such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop allows graduation in exposure digitally.
Hope this helps.
 

Islineclear3_1

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I am a photographer. On overcast days with a white sky, there is too much dynamic range between light and dark for the camera to deal with. This is more of a problem with digital cameras where light levels fall within a range of 255 - 0. Your photo can "blow out" the highlights (e.g. the sky) rendering it pure white

An ND grad darkens the sky thus reducing the dynamic range into a better usuable range for the camera and avoid any "blowouts". There might be detail in the sky that you want to include in the photo

Easier to do "in camera" than in Photoshop

You can take 2 pictures: one exposing for the sky and another exposing for the subject but with a moving train, how are you going to do that?
 

xc170

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I am a photographer. On overcast days with a white sky, there is too much dynamic range between light and dark for the camera to deal with. This is more of a problem with digital cameras where light levels fall within a range of 255 - 0. Your photo can "blow out" the highlights (e.g. the sky) rendering it pure white

An ND grad darkens the sky thus reducing the dynamic range into a better usuable range for the camera and avoid any "blowouts". There might be detail in the sky that you want to include in the photo

Easier to do "in camera" than in Photoshop

You can take 2 pictures: one exposing for the sky and another exposing for the subject but with a moving train, how are you going to do that?

Easilly, did you watch the video my first post?

ND Grads should have stayed in the film era.

https://mattk.com/why-graduated-neutral-density-filters-are-dead-to-me/
 

Robin Edwards

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I agree also that filters are a thing of the past given digital capabilities with proprietary software.
If I have bright and contrasting conditions I 'might' use RAW which gives me much better dynamic range saved in the image than a JPG would ever give although in most cases a good JPG still enables most exposure manipulation I need in most cases, graduated where needed, using Adobe LR. I usually ETTR (compensate exposure to the right by a stop or there about) and personally never use HDR since in my humble opinion, it makes images look 'unreal' in many cases. I know there are those that take superb images that post on Flickr and use high saturation of colour and wide exposure dynamic using HDR but in my mind, I don't think they look right to my eye.
 

xc170

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Only filters you cant recreate in Photosbop is an ND filter such as the 10 stop but even then there are ways of creating the same effect.

HDR done right is perfectly acceptable IMO, the problem is when people first discover it they over do it and go for the sickly cartoon look that gives HDR a bad name.

This photo of Bridge House Ambleside is a 3 photo HDR shot as even pushing the raw file as far as it could go wouldn't have captured the dynamic range.

https://flic.kr/p/2fTz1wz

Sorry posting from my phone so cant embed the Flickr link properly.
 

ash39

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For bright/difficult skies I tend to under-expose slightly and then increase the shadows in post-production slightly.
 
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