This was the 5th year in a row I had a photograph selected to be in the NMRA calendar. This shot is on the month of August. This shot also won "2nd Place - Color Model Photo" at the Thousand Lakes Region Convention in 2008.
The early morning sun burns the last of the mist off the stream as the Bona Vista Railroad’s #28 creeps across the ancient wooden bridge to begin her first run of the day. The scene takes place on Gerry Leone’s HO scale Bona Vista Railroad.
As with all my previous shots, this was taken with a Konica Minolta A-200 8-megapixel camera. The lighting was a single 75-watt bulb mounted in a "can" which was suspended out over the layout so that the light was coming from the engine's left side. It was a 15-second exposure. During the first 8 of those seconds I held an orange filter in front of the light (I found that if I left it there for 15 seconds, the shot got far too red -- see below.)
The fog in the stream was created by a real fog machine, which I "shot" at the bridge immediately before I took the photo. The smoke from the loco was created in Photoshop.
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Here's the camera setup for the above shot. You can see the train on the bridge just above the center of the picture. Suspended on a microphone boom stand and held on by red clips is the floodlight. The camera is on a tripod. The hose coming from the tripod is actually the fog machine, which is on the floor beneath the tripod. To take the shot, I turned off all the lights in the room except the suspended floodlight, held the orange filter in front of the light, aimed the hose at the train, stepped on the "on" switch for the fog machine and blew in some fog, dropped the hose quickly and hit the remote for the electronic shutter release on the camera, counted 8 seconds, and removed the orange filter. All of that in 15 seconds. I took approximately 50 shots before I got one I liked.
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Here's the same setup, shot from the other way
-- nothing's changed.
You can see the orange filter laying back on the layout above the camera. |
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This is one of the outtakes, showing what could go wrong. Here I blew far too much fog into the stream -- it looks like pea soup! Plus, I held the orange filter in front of the light too long, so the whole image looks like the train is passing a nearby fire... not quite the effect I was going for. |