Getting the Best Shot

When we were on holiday in Somerset this summer we took a trip to the West Somerset Steam railway and of course I took my camera along. I expected to get all the usual type of shots at a steam railway line, and I wasn’t disappointed. I managed to take several shots which I was

pleased with, but this image was my favorite of the day.

I had leaned out of the window to take a picture of the steam engine when I found another photographer was doing the same thing in the door in front of me.

The picture of the photographer seemed to me to be more interesting than the image of the engine, so I set the aperture to f8 and focused on the photographer’s hand in front of me. Fortunately I had a long lens fitted to my Pentax K-5 so the background was thrown out of focus, but still defined enough to make out what it was. I didn’t want the background to be completely blurred.

At f8 the K-5 said that 1/200th sec would be the correct exposure and I knew I could take a steady shot at that speed so I fired away. As alway I had the k-5 set to shoot RAW images so I couldn’t actually properly analyse the picture until we got home from holiday and I could post-process the shot in Lightroom 4.

I gad to pull the highlights down a touch and I also boosted the clarity a bit and applied a bit of noise reduction, but there was very little processing required other than that. I’m very pleased with the result and I would definitely classify this picture as one of my favorites.

Pentax K-5 iso640 F8 1/200

Tamron 70-300mm macro zoon

Lightroom 4.