Light Matters

Holy Ascension Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Radway, Alberta

Photographers are always talking about light... the quality of light, direction of light... we're obsessed with it. There's a reason for that. "Good" light makes a BIG difference in photos. Light matters.

Check out the photos above and below. These are churches that I photographed, seconds apart, and processed exactly the same. The left photo is without sunlight and the right photo has sunshine. Click on the photos to see a larger version.

Do you see how having "good light" makes a huge difference in the photo? The left photos are flat and lack contrast, while the subject (church) in the photos on the right stand out and draw the eye.

Limestone Lake Ukrainian Catholic Church, Alberta

Here are my recommendations:

• Look for "good" light - mornings and evenings
• On partly cloudy days, be patient and wait for the sun to peek out
• Try different angles to get the light you want

Another view of the Limestone Lake church - with canola

Making Pictures

I like to think about the craft of photography more than the mechanics of it. I think the thought process that goes on before you press the shutter button matters a lot more than what you do right at the instant of making a photo.

Don't get me wrong - you need to know how to use a camera to take good pictures. However, once you've achieved competence in using your camera, the real magic comes from your ideas on what photos you'd like to take. Or should I say "make"?

Making Pictures

I was listening to Lionel Strang's podcast "A Modeler's Life" and one of his guests, Blair Koostra, is a prolific railway photographer who has been published in TRAINS and elsewhere. One word that Blair used frequently really resonated with me. He talked about making photographs, not taking them.

I think there is a big idea there. When you take a photograph, you are simply recording what is in front of you. When you make a photograph, you are thinking about what you want the photograph to be, and taking steps to realize your vision. I like that a lot.

Continuous Improvement

In every vocation and every hobby, you get better at what you do with practice. You level up. Sometimes this is imposed on you - you get reassigned to a new position at work, or your boss gives you more responsibilities and you have to learn more skills - and sometimes you do it yourself by getting training or watching videos on YouTube or whatever.

CN 5761 in Edmonton, Alberta, June 2010, with blown-out sky

Many times, people get complacent and hit a plateau where they don't improve. It's comfortable to get to "good enough" and stay there, and in many cases that's perfectly fine. I'm "good enough" at some areas of my work and that's fine, but in many areas of my professional life and my personal life, I'm not satisfied with "good enough". My photography is one of those areas.

CEMR 5396, Oak Bluff, Manitoba, December 2017 - sky not blown out

A guest on another podcast, the excellent Afford Anything podcast, quoted a hero of theirs, Roman Mars, who said, "right now I'm embarrassed by the work I did last year, and I'm hoping that a year from now, I'm embarrassed by the work I'm doing right now."

Amen to that.

I'm embarrassed by that photo of CN 5761 above, from 2010. There was no excuse for blowing the sky out (pure white sky), but I did it. I had the exposure wrong, and I couldn't figure out how to expose it properly. I ended up either blowing the sky out or composing my photos to not include sky at all.

Contrast that with the pair of CEMR locomotives, taken with the same camera. I exposed it such that the sun wasn't blown out, yet the locomotives weren't a dark mass of shadow. My technique has improved in seven years!

Details Matter

CN 8930 at Diamond outside Winnipeg

I really try to think about what I can do to make the best picture. How should I compose this for maximum impact? What can I include in the photo to increase interest or better tell the story? More importantly, what can I leave out of the photo?

Have a look at the following pair of photos of the Fredericton train station. See what's different between the left and right photos.

Compare and contrast

I took the left photo, then walked about ten feet and made the right photo. I processed both the same, except that I cropped the right one a bit to remove a shadow. Can you see how the right photo is a better photo? There's no shadow coming from the bottom of the photo; no fire hydrant and yellow poles in the shot. Less distraction = more impact.

Now that I think of it, I could have laid my camera on the ground and tried that angle. There's always an opportunity to make a photo just a bit better.

Satisfaction Not Guaranteed

Don't be satisfied with one photo. Try a different angle. Lay down on the ground. Shoot through something as a frame. Try it from the non-sun side. Turn your camera 90 degrees. Turn it 45 degrees, even.

Sometimes it just won't work out. I know I've come away from some photo outings, feeling like I didn't get any decent shots, like it was just a waste of time and megabytes. Like it was pointless.

Those days happen.

Use those days as a determination to do better next time, to try something different, to take a fresh approach or try a new location. Something will change, and you'll get some magic.

Just get out there and try.

10 Questions for Kevin Burkholder

This series is modeled after the "Interesting Railfan" series in Railroad magazine from years ago. I'm asking each railfan 10 questions, some standard and some customized for the particular person. I hope you enjoy it. (See all in the series)

I put 10 questions to Kevin Burkholder, who is what you might call a professional railfan. He runs Steel Wheels Photography.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m a retired flight paramedic, having served 22 years in that particular venue and more than 30 as a paramedic overall.  I reside in the quaint railroad town of Bellows Falls, Vermont, with my wife and soon-to-be 9 children…#9 is due in September.  To be fair, several of the children have graduated and moved on, but we have age range from 21 down to newborn in September, which will then put us at 5 boys and 4 girls.

We affectionately have nicknamed our brood ‘the Burky Bunch’.  Despite the family and the former medical career, through doing various work for the rail media industry since 1988,  I have established many strong contacts in the rail industry, not just with railroads but with various builders, paint contractors and rebuilders.

NS 6920 in Binghampton. Photo by Kevin Burkholder.

2. Why do you like trains?

I grew up on Railroad Street in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, with my great grandfather working as an electrician for the Reading Railroad.  Within eyesight of the Reading Railroad and then Conrail after that, my grandmother would walk me to the tracks to watch the trains go by.

My photographic interest was sparked and I received a 110 camera for my 8th birthday, for which I put to good use shooting the end of the diverse schemes and the beginning of Conrail.  My father would continue to nurture the desire for train photography and had a slide camera that he would take with us on trips to various rail hotspots of the time, including Potomac Yard and other now long-gone locations around the country and Canada.

I started shooting slides in 1980ish and stayed with that until 1999, when my conversion to digital began.

3. If you could railfan anywhere, anytime, where and when would it be?

Back in Australia, where the scenery is as diverse and unique as the rail equipment itself.  I wouldn’t be able to pick any one spot specifically as I love different angles and locations.

NOW – if I could take my current array of equipment back in time, it would be 1955 to the old Chesapeake and Ohio transitional era, where I would likely be in heaven 😊

4. What’s your favorite railway?

The kind that runs…  Actually I don’t have any one favorite railway as I am intrigued by all operations and all types of equipment.  I do tend to appreciate shortline operations a bit more with their typically older motive power, but love to see trains as a whole (just ask my wife)!

5. How did you decide to get into commercial photography full time?

With photography almost always being my ‘real’ job when compared to my 2 or 3 day-a-week paramedic jobs, I had built a strong and growing customer base that were seeking more time and work as the years progressed.

The air medical industry was making turns that I was no longer comfortable with, particularly in the lack of focused patient advocacy, so after consultation with my chief financial officer, aka my wife Tonya, we decided that the timing (2016) would be right to turn the photo business into my primary business.

I had amassed the equipment through time and the client/customer base was growing with such entities as Genesee and Wyoming having more spot or last-minute assignments.

6. Please describe your photography workflow.

Biggest part of the workflow is planning ahead.  This includes the right equipment for the right location for the right environment ALL the time.  There are times that I preplan a scenario and then map out 3 or 4 variants so that in the end, my plan is complete.

Once to the subject, either safety brief or get into position if from public venue and make sure (aka double check) equipment to make sure that all settings are where you want them to be.  If a marginal weather day with intermittent sun, I make sure that I have settings in my head as to what I’ll change if the weather does.  I shoot in ALL manual mode, never using auto anything except White Balance.

Through the millions of images I’ve taken, I’ve established in my head which ISO to use, what speed and aperture to set, all the while thinking about how I’ll do the final edit to supply the customer with the desired result.

I shoot all images in raw, not touching any jpg settings in my camera.

Once complete with the day, I download the imagery onto a couple hard drives to insure their integrity and then go about editing my selected images with Lightroom and resizing and sharpening in Photoshop.  Depending on my customer’s desire, extra editing may be required or even multiple days.

7. How do you develop a good working relationship with railways?

This one is a HUGE and loaded question.  It is not something that happens in a day, or two or even a month, it is a commitment and professionalism you show for an extended period of time.  It is paying attention to safety and knowing the rules of the railroad, essentially, which in turn promotes respect for them back to you.

It is supplying them with quality product that they can use in marketing and public relations every time, not just the occasional marginal image.  It is being able to produce their desired result, no matter what the conditions are, day, night, rain, snow, sleet or whatever, and producing it how they want it.

It is not just being a railfan and submitting your best picture for consideration…

CP Holiday Train, Plattsburgh, NY

8. What's the most important recommendation you would give someone who was interested in professional photography?

I would say it is having the right equipment, the right motivation, the right training and absolutely (reiterating a previous point) knowing what your customer wants in the end.  There is photojournalism, which I also do, but there is also marketing and PR photography, which often means manipulating an image beyond what is out of the camera and having great knowledge of various editing software that will allow the production of such work.

9. What's in your camera bag?

I’m a Nikon guy for decades now, so my current equipment is as follows:

• Nikon bodies – D4s, D810 and D800;
• Lens compilation is actually quite simple and I’ll explain one of the choices in a moment, but I have a 14-24 mm Nikkor f2.8; 24-70 mm Sigma f2.8; 70-200 mm f2.8 Nikkor; a 400 mm f2.8 Nikkor; and a 1.7x Nikon teleconverter.
• In addition there are remote shutter releases, Pocket Wizard transceivers and batteries in there.

Now – that one Sigma lens in the bag – I had both the Nikkor and Sigma f2.8 lens and I put them head-to-head for comparison and in my case, the Sigma had just slightly higher quality in my images.

Was it an anomaly with the Nikkor lens?  Dunno, but I have stuck with the Sigma for that focal length and it is actually my go to lens for much of my work, especially the night photo work.

Genesee and Wyoming, Georgia

10. What projects do you have ongoing or planned?

I always have multiple projects and plans on the table – however right now the biggest project is keeping my super-hyper-active 2 year-old from injuring herself!  On the rail side, I have multiple TRAINS Magazine assignments in process with diverse writing and photography.

I am working on the annual Glory Days of the Railroad Festival for White River Jct., Vermont, (this year Sept 9-10) that I pull together all of the rail equipment for.  This is usually a rather stressful undertaking right up until the 11th hour when all of the equipment arrives on site.

Aside from that, I have been asked to participate in a charity event back in Australia that will be part of the Discovery Channel’s Railroads Australia series, as well as being invited back Down Under for a variety of other specialty/night photo work.

I had a chuckle recently when there was some jealous rumors floating about that said I had ‘terrorized’ Australia with the night photography.  Far from the slanderous accusations, so far that like I mentioned, another few trips are in the works at the cost of the railroads there getting me back there.

I love what I do and take on as much as possible, often being way in over my head, but after nearly drowning in a lake in minus 27 degree F temps, I feel like I can take it on and stay afloat.

Genesee and Wyoming, Millers Falls, Massachusetts

Thanks, Kevin! To see more of his work, visit his web site www.steelwheelsphotography.com, read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or see his thousands of photos on Railpictures.NET.

See all 10 Questions entries

Three Tips for Careful Composition

At the Trevi Fountain in Rome

I consider myself a decent photographer. Over the years, I've learned to slow down and take some time to carefully "craft" a photo - if I have time. Sometimes the trains don't wait and you have to shoot quickly, but sometimes... you have the time to do it right.

The two basic elements of a photograph are exposure and composition. I'll write about exposure another time but I wanted to talk a bit about how you can tweak your composition to get better photos.

These are examples of what you can do with composition to improve your photos... maybe not dramatically, but improve them a little bit. It's the details that matter and they all add up.

I'll discuss three things to think about while composing a photo:

• Watch the edges
• Move your feet
• No touching!

Watch the Edges

Ehh, all right, I guess

Here's a half decent photo of a telegraph pole along the CN main line. It's OK, but that wire along the bottom edge... it's distracting. What happens if we crop a bit?

Better!

Just getting rid of that little distraction improves the photo. It'll never be an award winner but it's not bad.

Always watch the edges of your photos for little distracting elements that creep into the photo. Branches, wires, posts... these little pests don't belong in your photo if they are not the main subject.

Move Your Feet

Wide open prairie... not bad!

I was out at Meadows, Manitoba and decided to photograph this road heading off into the distance. I think it's a good photo, but... that pole shadow across the road...

I walked forward a few steps, and voila!

Wide open prairie and no shadow!

Better? I think so. The photo is essentially the same but I eliminated the distracting shadow by moving my feet. I could have zoomed in a bit instead, but that would have changed the composition. By walking a few steps, I end up with the same wide open shot without the shadow.

If I was really picky, I would consider editing out that one tree in the middle of the horizon. It's another detail that I might not want in the shot.

Now, no tree

Sweet.

No Touching!

Try to keep the object of the photo from touching or obscuring other things in the photo. For example, check out these two photos, taken seconds apart.

Locomotive not obscuring the signal

Touching!

See how the locomotive in the second shot obscures the signal? I think the first is a better photo because you can see the whole signal tower. In the second photo you don't see the lower red indication.

It's subtle, but it makes a difference.

Another example. I spent about a minute composing the photo below.

St. Paul's Anglican Church, and fence

I wanted the focus to be on the fence, but not obscure the steeple. I also wanted the cross on top of the steeple to be isolated and not touch anything. It took a bit of maneuvering and careful positioning but I am very pleased with the result.

Details Matter

I hope those three elements of composition will help you improve your photography. Remember to watch the edges for distractions, move your feet to get only what you want in the photo, and keep elements from touching in the photo for maximum effect.

See Also

• How to Focus Your Camera at Night
• 5 Quick Tips to Improve Your Railfan Photography
• Recommended Camera Settings for Railfans
• The 7 Levels of Photographers (humour)

Limiting Beliefs

I listen to a lot of podcasts. One that I really like is Chamira Young's Pro Photographer Journey. She writes honestly about the business side of being a professional photographer and I learn a lot from her own explorations and interviews.

A recent recap episode she published, The Most Common Limiting Beliefs and Mindset Challenges that Photographers Face (whew! long title!), talked about the beliefs that may limit your potential for growth.

She talked about five limiting beliefs that I list below:

1. I don't deserve success.
2. I have to price my photography as cheaply as possible to compete.
3. I'm not as good as other photographers.
4. Professional photography is a dying industry.
5. It's too hard to please everybody.

I want to talk about #3 and #5 in particular.

I'm Not As Good As Other Photographers

As I always say to my kids, there's always somebody out there who is better at something than you are, and you are better at some things than a lot of other people.

It's easy to pick up a magazine or look on Facebook or Instagram to see some amazing photography and think, "man, I will never be that good."

That may be TRUE.

Don't let it limit you.

Keep in mind that the photographers you admire and feel are better than you have put in a ton of time and effort to hone their craft. They've taken training, they've learned from mentors, and they have put in the hard work to discover locations and techniques that help them to take great photos.

You can take great photos too.. if you want to, and you're willing to put the work in.

I remember when I first started taking train photos, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was terrible. It took me years before I started taking it seriously enough to study WHY I was bad at train photography, to learn from great photographers, study, and experiment.

I think I'm a much better photographer now. I also know there are others who are better than me.

That's OK.

I can keep learning and improving. There's no limit.

It's Too Hard to Please Everybody

I do like to please everybody. I'm greatly troubled when someone is mad at something I did or wrote. I always preferred to avoid conflict... which is a whole other blog post. Or two.

But here's the thing. There's an very old saying, "if you try to please everyone, you please no one" (maybe from Aesop?). That's good but I like this one better:

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run. - Viggo Mortensen

If Aragorn said it, it must be true.

You have to have your own voice. You have to be authentic and take photos and share stories the way you want to.

If there are people out there who don't like your style, or your photos, or your words? Too bad. Ignore them. There are plenty of people who will like what you make.

I recognize that a lot of people don't care for trains think of trains at all and that's OK. They probably won't come to my blog. They won't like my photos.

I'm not going to write about things I don't care about to try to capture a larger audience. It won't be good and I won't be happy with it.

So don't limit yourself by trying to please everybody. Produce good work, promote it, and you will get recognized for it. Maybe not today.. maybe not for a year.. but it will come.

The Sky's The Limit

More than ever, if you're willing to put the work in, there's no limit on what you can accomplish... in photography or elsewhere. Don't let the above limiting beliefs hold you back. Do good work.

See Also

• Jealousy
• Chamira's web site. She's good!

Review: Anker PowerCore Portable Battery

The Anker PowerCore battery

My wife and I were recently in Italy for vacation and we took a lot of photos. I took well over 3,000 photos with my Canon DSLR (and a few with my iPhone) and my wife took about 1,500 photos with her iPhone. One thing that really helped her (and I) was a portable battery to keep her phone charged, and we used the Anker PowerCore 20,000 mAh portable charger for that.

The need for this really came to light a few years ago when we were in London. We had just walked across the Tower Bridge in the rain, and were walking along the Thames River. We looked back and saw a double rainbow over the Tower Bridge. I hauled out my SLR and started taking photos, and my wife took maybe two photos and then her phone's battery died. No more!

When we returned to Canada, we bought a cigarette-pack sized battery which did a decent job but didn't really hold enough of a charge for vacationing.

Enter the Anker PowerCore 20,000 mAh charger. This beefy portable battery can charge an iPhone numerous times, and even completely recharge a dead iPad 2. It has a lot of juice.

Two USB ports and a charge port

The PowerCore has two USB ports on it so it can simultaneously charge two devices. We haven't really used this feature but it is there. You plug your device's USB cable into it and plug the other end into your phone or tablet, and off it goes.

The one button

Note: you do have to press a button on the Anker to turn it on. If you don't do this, it won't charge your device. Once you do this, the Anker will stay on until the device is fully charged.

The PowerCore is pretty plain to look at - a heavy black pack with three ports on one end (two USB and a micro USB for charging the Anker), a single button on the side, and LED indicator lights to show how much charge the Anker has in it. Pressing the button lights the LED, with 1-4 lights indicating the relative charge in the Anker. The LEDs also stay on while charging.

The PowerCore comes in a classy box with a travel bag, a micro USB cable, and a manual. You have to supply the appropriate USB cables to connect your devices, and your own USB wall charger to charge the PowerCore.

Almost empty!

Note that it takes a long time to recharge the PowerCore. Overnight might be enough to top it up but it might take 24 hours to fully recharge an empty PowerCore. It takes a long time to run one of these down but it takes a long time to fill them back up! Use a good USB wall charger that puts out at least 2A; the cheap 0.5A USB devices will take forever to charge this battery. You could use an Anker PowerPort 4 (40W) to charge it.

The 20,000 mAh version is heavy - 354g or almost 0.8 pounds - and long. It's a little big to fit in a pocket of your pants without getting in the way. I keep it in a pocket of my camera bag and it's fine there.

If that's too big for you, get the 10,000 mAh version at half the weight and smaller than a deck of cards. It only has one USB port but otherwise it's the same... just with half the capacity.

I highly recommend this portable battery. You need to keep your devices charged and Anker is a premiere brand in the portable charger space.

We used this extensively on our recent trip to Italy. My wife often had it in her pocket, keeping her iPhone at 100% charge. If she didn't have pockets, I put it in a pouch in my camera bag and we brought it out at meals to give our devices a boost. We never ran out of power.

In Canada this usually lives in our van where it can charge one of our phones while the others' phone is plugged into the van's power outlet. It gets a lot of use.

Buy Anker PowerCore 20,000 mAh battery: Canada or USA
Buy Anker PowerCore 10,000 mAh battery: Canada or USA

PS - Italy was awesome. I promise, photos are coming.

Me on top of the Duomo in Florence, Italy

This post contains affiliate links that earn me a commission when you purchase something after clicking the link, at no additional cost to you.

How To Focus Your Camera at Night

If you've tried to take a photo in the dark of night, you may have found your camera had a hard time focusing... or never focused at all.

Digital cameras focus by looking for contrast within the image. They are looking for areas where a bright part of the image is next to a darker part. This is why cameras focus best on sharp edges like door frames, building edges and so forth.

The problem with focusing at night is that everything is dark so there is very little contrast. This causes cameras to "hunt" for focus and often fail to lock in a good focus, resulting in blurry photos. My camera will often refuse to take a photo at all because it didn't focus.

Two solutions for focusing at night are:

• Using a light to assist
• Live view

Using a Light

If you have a light handy, you can use that to illuminate your subject and provide enough contrast for your camera to achieve focus. You can use a flashlight, your car's headlights, or even your cell phone to put a little light on your subject.

Once you achieve focus with your camera, put it in manual focus to keep that focus point and start shooting.

For the photo at the top of this post, I used my portable flashlight (which is ridiculously bright) to light up the signal tower.

First I put my camera on a tripod. Then I lit the signal tower up with the flashlight, and focused on the tower using my camera's auto focus.

Once it achieved focus, I flipped the switch on the lens to put it in manual focus and turned the flashlight off.

As long as I didn't zoom in or out, or change the location of the camera, the focus would stay "good" and I could take as many photos as I liked.

Live View

Another option is to use the "live view" feature of your camera. This is a feature of most DSLRs where it will show what the camera's sensor sees, in real time, on the display on the back of your camera. Normally when you look through the viewfinder, you are seeing a reflection off the mirror in your camera.

Live view has its benefits because it is brighter than the viewfinder, and you can zoom in. In the video below, recorded in Fargo, North Dakota, I used live view to focus on the clock tower of the Fargo train station.

The basic idea is this:

• Put the camera on a tripod
• Put the lens in manual focus
• Turn live view on
• Expand the live view as far as you can go
• Use the focus ring on the lens to focus using the live view as a reference
• Turn live view off and take photos

In this case I had the benefit of a relatively bright clock face, but it works pretty well in darker situations as well.

Live view really sucks the battery, so you don't want to use it long term.

This should work well for mirrorless cameras, where you are basically using live view all the time. I don't have a mirrorless camera so I don't have any personal experience of this.

I hope this helps you take some great night photos. Shooting at night is a totally different experience and I enjoy the challenge and the different perspectives it brings!

See Also

• Understanding camera autofocus
• Night Train
• Editing a Night Photo in Lightroom
• Other photography posts

How to Fix Backlit Photos in Lightroom

Backlit photo - before and after

Here's a common problem. You see an interesting subject but the light is behind the subject. This is called "backlit" for obvious reasons.

Maybe you can't move to a spot with better light, or the subject is a train that's moving and you have to get the shot now. You take the photo anyway and you end up with something like this:

Can we make this better?

To quote Bob the Builder, "Yes We Can!"

The quick version of what we're going to do in Adobe Lightroom is:

• Boost shadows
• Reduce highlights
• Increase saturation
• Deal with noise 

Let's get to it.

What Does "Backlit" Mean?

Let's define what "backlit" means. It's defined as "illuminated from behind" meaning that the light source is farther away from the photographer than the subject is, and the light source is in the same direction as the subject.

It could mean that the light is directly "in line" with the subject, silhouetting the subject; or it might not be in line and simply causes deep shadows like the photo above.

Why is Backlighting Bad?

First off, it isn't always bad. In portrait photography you often want backlighting - often combined with a little flash.

However, in landscape or railfan photography, backlighting is usually undesired. Why?

The main reason why backlighting is bad are the deep shadows it causes, which obscure details. A secondary problem is the sky, which is often too bright or pure white from the camera trying to expose for the subject and "blowing out" the sky.

How To Fix Backlighting in Lightroom

In Adobe Lightroom, there are two main things you can do to fix backlit photos - boost the shadows and reduce the highlights.

If you use other editing programs, the process is likely similar, but I'll go through the process with Lightroom.

The basic steps are the following:

1. Boost Shadows by about +50
2. Reduce Highlights by about -90
3. Increase saturation
4. Deal with noise
5. Make final adjustments

Boosting Shadows

In Lightroom, open the image in the Develop module and go to the Basic panel. Try boosting the Shadows to +50 and see how it looks.

Backlit - boosting the shadows

This definitely brings out some detail on the "dark side" of the locomotive, without significantly affecting the brightness of the rest of the photo. Note that the grass in the foreground is a bit brighter too.

Boosting the shadows is a lot easier if you shoot in RAW format with your camera, if you can. RAW format files have a lot more information in them than a JPG file does.

Now we reduce the highlights.

Reducing Highlights

In Lightroom, take the Highlights slider in the Basic panel and slide it down to about -90.

Backlit - reducing the highlights

What we're doing here is reducing the brightness of the sky. As I mentioned above, the sky is often too bright in backlit photos so bringing the highlights down usually reduces the sky's brightness.

If the sky was totally blown out (pure white) then this won't do a lot but it will help. For blown-out skies, you may need to add a graduated filter in Lightroom and reduce the brightness of the sky further. You may also have to reduce the saturation in that filter because totally blown out skies often have an unwanted colour cast to them.

Increasing Saturation

Backlit photos often look washed out, so they benefit from a little colour saturation.

In Lightroom you have two sliders that directly affect how much colour is in the photo: saturation and vibrance. They both affect the intensity of colour in the image but vibrance is a little more subtle than saturation is. This article explains the difference well. Think of vibrance as a gentle way to boost colour where it's needed while saturation is a colour fire hose. A little of the saturation slider goes a long way... but sometimes you have to go wild with it.

Backlit - adding saturation

Now I'm sure you're saying - "hold it, that looks terrible!" That grass looks totally unrealistic.

I agree. Let's fix it with a graduated filter. I dragged it up from just below the horizon to overlap the bottom of the locomotive and horizon a bit, then reduced the saturation in the filter to -40 to partially compensate for the saturation added above. I didn't fully compensate because I wanted a bit more colour in the grass than the original.

Backlit - fixing the grass with a graduated filter

So that looks pretty good. We're almost done.

Dealing With Noise

The problem with boosting shadows in images is that you also boost the digital noise. In film days we'd call this "grain" but with digital images it is noise. Basically, digital cameras record some information for dark areas but not a lot. If you increase the exposure in mostly black areas, this lack of information shows up as noise or pixelated, blocky details. Have a look at the image below, shown at 2:1 size.

Noise in boosted image

You can see how grainy it looks. Also, I haven't sharpened the image yet beyond the default of +25, so we have to do that... but sharpening can often make noise worse, so we have to balance the two.

One very important slider in Lightroom that deals with sharpening is the "Masking" slider. I never knew about this slider when I first started using Lightroom and I wish I had!

If you have the Masking slider at zero, basically you are applying sharpening to the entire image. Often you don't want or need to do that. In our working image we'd like to sharpen the edges of the locomotive and the details on it, but we don't want to sharpen the sky and we probably don't want to sharpen the grass very much. The Masking slider allows us to decide what parts of the image we should sharpen. I'll write more about that sometime but for now this article gives a good overview of sharpening in Lightroom.

Here's the same closeup after aggressively sharpening at 111 (masking 57) with luminance noise reduction of 44.

After sharpening and noise adjustment

Final Adjustments

A few final adjustments will finish the job. I decided the image could use these adjustments:

• White balance adjustment - temp +350, tint +2 (I thought the original was a bit blue)
• Brightness +0.36
• Clarity +10
• Post-Crop Vignetting -12

Here's the final image.

After final edits

I hope you'll agree this image is a lot better than the original. It won't win any awards but it is definitely an improvement.

Final Comments

This might seem like a lot of work, but one of the great things about Adobe Lightroom is that you can put these into a preset and apply them - bang - all in one shot. I've developed a "backlit" preset to do all this in a few seconds, and then I do whatever minor tweaks I feel are necessary to finish the photo. This takes editing time down from 10 minutes to 1 minute. I hope to package these presets up soon and offer them as a download, but for now you can make your own preset with the settings below, or experiment with other presets like the 101 Lightroom Presets Pack from Digital Photography School.

These are the edits I made to this image:

• Shadows +50
• Highlights -90
• Saturation +71
• Graduated filter with exposure -40
• Edge masking 68
• Sharpening 111
• Luminance Smoothing 44
• Exposure +0.36
• Clarity +10
• Post-Crop Vignette -12
• White Balance adjustment

Thanks for reading along!

Further Reading

• 5 Reasons Why You Need Adobe Lightroom
• Editing a Night Photo in Lightroom
• Recommended Camera Settings for Railfans
• A Lightroom Editing Example

Disclosure: This post contains one or more links that are affiliate links, for which I may earn a commission if you follow the link and purchase something from the site that they link to.

Patience, or my lack of it

Scott Bourne wrote a great article about patience in photography, especially with outdoor photography. He wrote that "sometimes you just have to wait for the weather to play ball."

It's great advice. I just wish I had patience.

If you've ever been out to photograph a sunrise or sunset, you'll know that conditions change rapidly. One minute's golden glory turns quickly into a fairly boring morning sky. You have to act quickly... but you have to have the patience to wait for the right moment.

Waiting for the Sun

Back in the summer of 2014 I was heavy into my Manitoba grain elevator project. In August 2014 I was on a two-day trip to photograph every elevator in the southeastern corner of Manitoba. I was on a timetable (planned in detail in Excel), with about 15 minutes allocated to photograph each elevator. Patience was not factored in!

I was at Nesbitt to photograph the former Manitoba Pool grain elevator outside town. The day was partly cloudy and the sun was not out when I arrived, which led to this rather bland photograph.

OK, I guess

I mean, it's all right, but it was nothing special.

I could see that the sun was going to come out, so I cooled my heels for a few minutes, driving around impatiently looking at different angles and waiting for the sun. After about 10 minutes the sun did come out and man, it made a difference.

This one, I like

If I hadn't waited, I would have had to live with a so-so photo. I know I may never see some of these elevators again and I tried pretty hard to capture good photos of each one. Sometimes that wasn't possible, but often with a little patience, and willingness to consider other angles, I was able to capture the elevator properly.

Waiting on a Train

Promises, promises

We've all been there... waiting for literally hours for a train to come. When I lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick, I would go up to McGivney to wait for trains on the CN mainline there.

The signals might show green but they were no promise of an imminent train. It could literally be more than an hour after a green signal appeared for a train to appear... if not longer.

Long-time readers may remember my disappointment at McGivney back in 2008 when my son and I were waiting for a VIA Ocean detour. He was as patient as I could ask for but we left... just before the train came through.

I'm fortunate in Winnipeg that there are a lot of trains around, and if you're willing to move around, you can find one or two. Still, there are times when I hunt for an hour or two and really come up with very little.

Patience... Not One of My Virtues

Spooky CN signals

If you've ever railfanned with me, you'll know I don't sit still for long. I am not one of those who sits in one spot for hours on end. I wish I could, honestly, but I get bored.

Fortunately, I can force myself to stay in one spot if I need to. I went out on the night of October 30th to do some night photography, because I had carved a big "CN" in my pumpkin and wanted to photograph it by the tracks.

I went down to Lorette on the CN Sprague subdivision and set it up by the signals... the green signals. I took a series of photographs, some of which turned out and some did not.

I knew a train was coming... eventually. I kept pacing back and forth, looking down the track and checking the time. I'm not very patient! Eventually I saw a headlight in the distance from Winnipeg. That's a 7 mile stretch of straight track.

I waited... and waited... and waited... that train seemed to take a long time to travel that 7 miles.

My "patience" paid off with this shot of the CN intermodal train rolling past.

Streaking at night

I hope the CN crew saw my pumpkin!

Patience Pays Off

There are definitely benefits to being more patient. This article lists a few, including lowering your stress levels and helping you make better decisions.

In some cases, patience is absolutely critical to meeting your goals.

For example, a lot of people want to lose weight but they aren't patient about it, which leads to the many "lose weight fast" fad diets that don't work. It takes a lot of time to lose weight and you can't rush it.

I've been working to lose weight since the beginning of this year. It's taken many months but I've lost the 25 pounds I wanted to lose to get to a healthy weight.

In this case, patience has paid off for me.

Did you know there are exercises to train your patience?

How's Your Patience?

It's your turn - how patient are you? Leave a comment!

Further reading:

• Read Scott's article
• Finding patience