Early-morning time-exposure digital cam shots at Minto!

[craigd]

During the long layover early this morning at Minto resulting from the track
closure between Glenfield and Campelltown, I decided to try out some
time-exposure pics with my trusty Olympus D540Z 'PHD' digital camera... Some
were not good due to the way the floodlighting is set up (you'll see the
nice 'yellow' cast from the sodium-vapour floodlights), but some turned out
really well:

Two pics of 4497 in the MIST depot at Minto:

http://www.railzone.org/gallery2/main.p ... emId=11112

http://www.railzone.org/gallery2/main.p ... emId=11097

One pic of 4703 (my loco for the night!) on the MIST train at Minto:

http://www.railzone.org/gallery2/main.p ... emId=11109

Hope you all like the pics. I'm doing the night-time MIST shift 6 nights in
a row this week (will make more $$$ in that six days than I'd get for a
whole fortnight with CityRail!) so I'll capture some more pics of locos if
we have different ones later in the week.

Time to invest in a good-quality tripod I think.

Regards,

Craig.

[johnmc]

Fairly well all digital cameras have some sort of manual white balance setting somewhere. It took me a while to find mine.

Can't find any railshots, but this is a sunset (from a loco, so i guess it's kinda rail related) taken with the white balance set to "auto".



And the same sunset - seconds later - with the white balance changed to "tungsten" (May also be "incandescent"), or just have an icon of a filament electric bulb.

Time to invest in a good-quality tripod I think.

It doesn't have to huge or expensive to do the job, either.



This little guy cost me about $30.00 in a Mt Isa camera shop - you should be able to do much better in Sydney - and fits into my workbag nicely. Yes, you'll have to put it on something first (thought it does do dramatic "ground level" photos quite well, linky, linky), but it's quite a stable platform for longish exposures.

[craigd]

Hi there and thanks for the reply!

Yes a small tripod is what I need - I'm going to try out one of the tiny tripods I found on Ebay today (not a flexi-leg one - mini version of a proper tripod) and see how that goes. I used my billy upside down and also tried using a safety cone as a camera base last night to capture some pics of 1427 and 4497 at Minto and I found where the white-balance settings are on the camera so if you look at the pics I uploaded this morning they're almost 'correct' as far as white balance goes. BTW I've also uploaded some of the pics to my flick.com railway imagery album.

The capability of the camera is actually excellent given that it's a simple 3.2 megapixel digital cam with only a 3x optical zoom, and a tiny flash (which I have resisted using as a 'fill flash' for any of the night shots so far).

I'm looking to update the camera soon to a newer one but for it's been a superb investment as I use the camera to record rail pics, car pics (my Saab's!), and family pics too. I'm aware of it's limitations (mainly the lack of more optical zoom and no really good macro-focusing ability, plus the tiny flash) so I try to compose pics accordingly.

Craig.