12-22-16

On this night, my son-in-law Francis was out with me taking some night photos at a different location.  When we were done with those photos, I was still in the mood for some more, but something different than what we were doing.  So I thought, let’s go to this passenger car and see if we can improve on the the photos I had previously taken a few months prior.  Previously I had taken night photos of this train car however I only took photos of the car, without a person.

So we came back and started to think about how I wanted this photo to look.  Originally I thought about having him sit in one of the seats inside to represent a passenger.  But that didn’t look very good when we tried it.  Plus, more graffiti was on the car then our previous photos and I wanted to minimize it as much as possible.  So we came up with the idea of Francis standing in the vestibule area.

To get the shot, Francis had to stand real still for an extended period of time while I light painted the outside of the car with a flashlight.  Then using a handheld flash, I lighted him up from the other side and then went inside the car a flashed a few times to make the inside look like the lights were on.

Because we had photographed this car previously, I had a pretty good game plan on how to successfully light it up the way I wanted.  So luckily we only had a few attempts before I was satisfied with the results.  This was a good thing because I forgot to mention – it was really cold that night.  So I think Francis stood so still for the duration was because he was frozen in place!  In the end, the final photo was almost 2 1/2 minute exposure and I like it better than the photos I had previously taken of this passenger car.