Photos Taken: July 21, 2018
Yes, I’m still working on my exposure settings for moving trains. Earlier this summer I posted my results from previous settings and talked about my plan to improve my photography. My last post on the effort was July 11; I had improvements over the early summer efforts but felt like there was more improvement to be made.
To put it in a nutshell, I decided to go with manual exposure, setting a fast shutter speed to capture the moving trains and an f-stop in the range of 8.0 to capture some depth of field but keeping the Sony A7R3 ability to do fast (phase detect) focusing. Without too many more words, here are my results. You can click on the individual images to bring up bigger versions if you want to see more detail.
Sony A7R3; 1/800 sec at f/6.3, ISO 200
As this Amtrak rolled through, my camera lost its focus point. I had about 5 more images after this [image has been cropped] but they were way, way out of focus. This happened twice. I think the culprit was the “Lock-on AF: Expand Flexible Spot” setting for focus area. I switched to “Lock-on AF: Flexible Spot M[edium]” and “S[mall]” These settings kept the trains in focus as it moved past.
Then I pulled out my Sony RX10M4 bridge camera to see how it would do. I couldn’t exactly duplicate the settings but tried to keep them similar.
I’m pretty happy with these. Using a fast shutter speed definitely helps. I notice that in my effort to capture the lead locomotive, my shots often leave a lot of the train out. I need to work on a better angle – something like this.
So there it is – manual mode seems to work well. I’m confident enough to go to another location and take pictures of faster moving trains in some other location. More on that in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.
