IN THE FIELD: Railroad Museum 2

In my previous post, I mentioned the challenging lighting conditions inside the railroad museum I recently toured. I use the word challenging, not because the conditions were difficult, but because the lighting was constantly changing.

The combination of the skylights overhead providing one light source on a blustery winter’s day alternating between sunshine and cloud cover, along with the high intensity interior building lights, set the stage for the challenge of this shoot. After composing the shot and adjusting the shutter speed and aperture for the exposure I wanted, within seconds the light would change.

Time to change methods. I realized in order to have a fighting chance of getting the proper exposure, I needed to switch to aperture priority. Aperture and shutter priority are two settings I seldom use for outdoor applications, but in this case I found aperture priority especially handy. I was able to compose the shot, choose the aperture so I could control the depth of field, and let the camera decide on the appropriate shutter speed as the intensity of light continued to change. In most cases, it worked pretty well.

Although the museum was well lit with artificial light in combination with the ever-changing natural light, I did use a flash for small close-up shots. Even then, I played around with different aperture, shutter and flash settings to alter the effect of the flash and the amount of light I added to the scene.

For these compositions, I wanted the blacks to remain black, still have some detail in the shadows, and keep the lighter areas from becoming over-exposed. I experimented with different shutter and aperture settings so I could achieve the image I was after. I wanted to capture the final image in-camera, and not have to take multiple images and combine them in the computer with post-processing. Overall, I am pleased with the results.