Colorful Caboose, Nacogdoches TX

Well the caboose isn’t really colorful, but the sky is! I knew from the looks of the clouds in this sky that we were in for a very colorful sunset, but I didn’t have time to go to any of our normal sunset locations (aka, the lake). The railroad tracks are only a few minutes from our house, so I gave it a try. I’m glad I did because even the ugly old train tracks looked pretty with this sky!

This is a single 4 second exposure. I used a three-stop soft-step graduated neutral density filter and a two-stop soft-step graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure between the foreground and the sky. I wish I had closed down to f/22 for a little added depth of field so that the caboose was in sharper focus. Focusing on something a little further away would have helped too. With shots like this, my thinking is that if something is out of focus in the foreground, it is going to be more noticeable than something in the background. It’s for photos like this that I would like to be able to manually blend exposures in photoshop. That way I could blend one exposure focused on the foreground and another focused on the background, a technique called focus stacking. But I’d have to get photoshop first!

Thanks for your comments last week! My most popular photo from last week was very special for me because it is a photo of my beautiful wife! Check it out if you haven’t already.

Critiques are always welcome.

Daily photo: March 4, 2013, taken February 28, 2013

Colorful Caboose, Nacogdoches TX

Well the caboose isn’t really colorful, but the sky is! I knew from the looks of the clouds in this sky that we were in for a very colorful sunset, but I didn’t have time to go to any of our normal sunset locations (aka, the lake). The railroad tracks are only a few minutes from our house, so I gave it a try. I’m glad I did because even the ugly old train tracks looked pretty with this sky!

This is a single 4 second exposure. I used a three-stop soft-step graduated neutral density filter and a two-stop soft-step graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure between the foreground and the sky. I wish I had closed down to f/22 for a little added depth of field so that the caboose was in sharper focus. Focusing on something a little further away would have helped too. With shots like this, my thinking is that if something is out of focus in the foreground, it is going to be more noticeable than something in the background. It’s for photos like this that I would like to be able to manually blend exposures in photoshop. That way I could blend one exposure focused on the foreground and another focused on the background, a technique called focus stacking. But I’d have to get photoshop first!

Thanks for your comments last week! My most popular photo from last week was very special for me because it is a photo of my beautiful wife! Check it out if you haven’t already.

Critiques are always welcome.

Daily photo: March 4, 2013, taken February 28, 2013