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Beyer-Garratt 143 passes through Nantmor halt, southbound on the Welsh Highland Railway Fujifilm 16-55mm F2.8 LM WR II @ 19.3mm | F6.4 | 1/1000 sec | ISO 5000 |
After a frankly overwhelming 2023, this year has been one that’s helped me re-connect with my love of photography.
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A couple of trips back to the UK have certainly helped with this. Despite nominally being on vacation, it’s always tempting to use trips home as a means of building up ‘real-world’ time on a camera, or take the literal change of scenery as a way to add variety to our sample galleries. It was still something of a surprise to notice that none of the images I narrowed my choice down to were taken in Seattle.
My final choice was as much about the experience of shooting it as the image itself. It was taken during a five-day hike across North Wales, because that seemed like a sensible thing to do in late October.
“It was taken on day three of a five-day hike across North Wales”
Day three of the trip had included the first serious downpour and our spirits were a little overcast as we stopped for lunch. Our break was interrupted by the distant sound of a steam train’s whistle, and suddenly I made the connection to the stream of smoke we’d seen trailing across the Glaslyn valley, from a high vantage point earlier in the day.
Another hour’s walk and our route finally crossed the hilariously narrow-gauge tracks of the Welsh Highland Railway, at Nantmor halt. A search of the station showed no sign of a timetable, and roaming data wasn’t in any hurry to convey the information but eventually we found that a southbound train was due at the station just north of us in about ten minutes’ time.
This gave my companion a chance to rest his legs and me enough time to set up the camera for the train’s arrival. Could I possibly take both a video and a photo of a train that wasn’t necessarily going to stop? I’d need to change the camera settings pretty rapidly to achieve both.
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Thankfully I knew that ‘Movie Optimized Control’ mode on the X-T5 would ensure that none of the exposure settings would carry across from video mode to stills, so that I didn’t try to capture a photo of a moving train at 1/48 seconds or shoot video at 1/1000th.
Fleeting patches of sunshine meant five minutes of anxiously adjusting the vari ND on the front of the lens, but also meant there was a decent level of contrast when the train finally appeared.
I captured some 22 seconds of video of the train’s arrival before hitting stop and frantically unscrewing the ND filter from the front of the lens. I then managed about three backward steps and to quickly zoom the lens out before hitting the shutter.
The result is a surprisingly decent shot of the Manchester-built, ex South African Railways 2-6-2+2-6-2T Garratt loco. Or a train that “looks like a sad one-eyed monster” as a friend described it.
Richard’s also-rans
I always find it hard to judge my own photos. Here are the others that didn’t quite make the cut, with descriptions of why I picked them:
Our DPREVIEW Tribute:
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview closed on 10 April 2023. This difficult decision was part of the annual operating plan review that parent company, Amazon, shared earlier this year.
Over the course of 25 years, DP Review built up a reputation as being one of the most informative places to go for information about that new camera or lens you’re after. DP Review began as an independent reviews site based in the UK in 1998, the brainchild of Philip and Joanna Askey, but it was eventually purchased by Amazon in 2007 and relocated over to Seattle in the USA in 2010.
Cheers DPReview – thanks for the great work and content that guided photographers, videographers and techno junkies the world over!
