12-17-23

I had a thought on a potential night train photo with stars above the train. In the past, I did a photograph of a train passing in the night with a train signal visible in the shot. I really liked the photograph and I am surprised I never included it in one of these blogs. But it made me think of how I could do that same thing but this time include some stars above.

For the previous photograph, I had help from my son-in-law to put the whole thing together. I set up my camera on a tripod and worked out the settings on the camera. Then naturally had to wait for a train to pass by to make it all work. When the train passed by, my son-in-law would stand off to the side and trigger the flash at the right time to light up the engine.

This gave me the background to do this type of photograph again and hopefully maybe even improve on it. To give you a better understanding of what I was going for, let me explain. Being this is a night photograph, naturally, you need a long exposure to capture enough light. What I wanted to do, was two different components. One, I wanted to have long trails of stars overhead, instead of just pinpoint stars. Second, I wanted to light up a passing locomotive for an interesting foreground.

To cover the first part, I wanted to hopefully include the North Star. During long exposures of the stars, the rotation of the earth will make the stars rotate around the North Star. This creates a group of circles getting longer and longer the further they are from the center or North Star. I think the effect looks very cool and enjoy doing this type of photography. To accomplish this, my method is to take numerous photographs of the stars from a fixed location. The time for each photograph may vary and is dependent on how long of a trail you desire. Typically each exposure would be for one to two minutes and I will later blend these all together in Photoshop to create the effect.

To make sure I have the North Star in the shot, I had to research a location that would include the star. So I drove to a location near some railroad tracks and tried different spots hoping to include the star in my composition. I did this during daylight to make it easier to see the area and composition possibilities. I used an app on my phone that would show me the location of the North Star for any given date or time to make sure it would work.

Once this was accomplished, I then made sure there was enough room for not just my camera and composition, but also to ensure there would be enough room for the additional lighting I wanted to use. My son-in-law had another commitment and could not help me this time, so I would be on my own. The plan was to have a couple of light boxes with remote triggers set up strategically near the camera. When the train locomotive would come by, I would activate the camera on a 5-10 second shutter opening and when the locomotive passed by in front, I would trigger the light boxes. This would ideally light up the locomotive for a fraction of a second, giving it a frozen appearance as if it were a regular photo during daylight. Yet the longer exposure would allow some light trails from the lights on the engine to show up as additional streaks of light.

So that is the plan. Now the tough part is this is mid-December, so winter weather is upon us. Don’t even ask why I waited this long to do this – like when it is warmer and drier. Because of the time of year, clouds are pretty common and with clouds, naturally I won’t be able to get any star trails. I was constantly checking the forecast without much hope for success. Then while sitting around one afternoon, I realized the skies had cleared. The forecast was for more rain to start the next day and continue for the foreseeable future. So I jumped up and jammed everything into my car and was off by early evening.

Luckily I had done the preplanning trip and knew where I wanted to go and set up. Shortly after arriving, the first train had come by. Of course, I wasn’t even close to ready, but I did some checks to make sure the composition would be as good as I had hoped. I finished setting up and started to wait for another train. In this area, there are no scheduled freight trains, so you just have to wait and hope.

The thing you can not plan for, easily, is how much light to use to accomplish the effect you are hoping for. What you need is a train to go by and experiment with the light power settings. Again, there are no guarantees on how many or if any trains will come by at a given time. The other aspect is how much light is the train itself going to introduce to the scene, which affects your own lighting.

Luckily a couple more trains came by while I was there. The first one was not a success, but I used it to try and get my light settings dialed in a little closer. The second one I was able to get the power settings closer and at least useable for a photo. It didn’t help that trains were coming from different directions, which changed where the light boxes needed to be located to be more ideal. I could have used a few more trains to really get the setup more ideal, but you do what you can do and hope for the best.

Considering the time between trains was over an hour long, I used this time to accomplish my star trail photos. My original setup had to take into consideration the composition that would include the star trails and enough room to include the train and locomotive. I do not want to move the camera/tripod at all for the entire night. Otherwise, the composition would be from two different angles. So I had to make sure that once I planted the tripod, everything had to work from there. Using an intervalometer, I set it up to take the number of continuous shutter snaps to create the star trails. For this photograph, I was taking one-and-a-half-minute shots and did 30 of these.

Once I was completed, everything was packed back into the car for the return trip. The evening was naturally dark and it was also pretty cold – remember, it was December. By the end, I was ready to leave and hoped for the best when I took off.

In the next couple of days, I reviewed the photos I had taken. Remember, the camera and tripod did not move all night, so any photos taken were fair game for the final project. Once I figured out which photos worked the best, I stacked them all together in Photoshop. Even though I know of things I would have liked to do better, if there is a next time, I was pretty happy with how it all worked out. Hope you like looking at this.