Yesterday, after the culmination of several weeks of fussing, we managed to make a trip down to
Edaville Railroad in Carver, Mass. Well, when I say
we, I mean Katherine, Alex, Grandpa and I along with most of a family we're friendly
with. What follows is a short photo-essay on our experience at Edaville.
I don't necessarily like taking photographs from the tops of mountains - it really depends on the view. But taking photographs
from a Ferris wheel, now that is usually very productive. In this case, I just couldn't resist. There's a really nice landscape
in here somewhere and I'm not sure this is it. You don't have a lot of changes to frame things when you're spinning around
on a Ferris wheel. But in this case, I could tell that the low angle of the sun was producing sidelight that would show up
nicely. I also liked the reflection of the trees in the ice and the idea that this is really a view from the back.
Turning our attention to the right of the scene above, we find the main entrance road. The huts to the left
are holiday-themed dioramas. There are a few shops to the right and some rides and in the background is the park entrance
and parking lot.
There are rides in the other direction too. This shot is to the left across the pond from the trees in the
first shot. Now, I had to ride Jumbo the Elephant because for some, strange mystical reason, Katherine was not taller than
the limit to ride without an adult. I say mystical, because I'm pretty sure that if this was my yardstick at home, she'd have
been OK.
At any rate, being on one of the red elephants gave me a chance to look at the creepy ringmaster up close.
brrrgggh.
OK, enough of that. Edaville is about trains, so let's get too it. After a bite to eat (and it was pretty
good, too) we got on the train. Here's the platform with the folks disembarking from the previous ride. Please take note of
the lights on the bottom of the train - they'll come into play later. It has gotten dark at this point, so taking pictures
becomes very challenging. And yet, we're less than halfway done.
The ride itself is about a half hour long. There is quite a bit of fussing about in the loading and unloading
of passengers. They are quite careful with this, you see. They could probably use some lessons from the English about taking
tickets, though. Kara was on the floor laughing when I told her what happened.
You see, you don't need a ticket for anything except the train ride, so by the time we got to the train we
have to fumble about for them. The "conductor" came around to punch them, but it took him awhile. He was having trouble seeing.
I told Kara that in England the conductor barely breaks a stride collecting tickets, and by comparison, this guy has literally
got a common office hole puncher and he's having trouble threading the ticket into it.
At any rate, on this ride you get to see displays on the banks of the tracks. Some of them are lit up:
Many of them are not, though. They become lit when the train passes by because those lights on the bottom
are really floodlights. They are bright in the photo above, but that's at the platform with other light around. In the darkness
of the woods they are really bright. So there are butterflies in the trees and other things. I won't spoil it for
you. It's a fantastic trip if you have kids.
Anyway, so we're at the station later when the train comes around. A fog is coming up, so I take a risk with
a relatively tricky exposure. This photo translates to web format poorly -- it's very hard to get the tones correct.
Note the faint impression of a car between the two light displays. There were a few cars just kindof randomly parked around.
That was a bit of a drag on the atmosphere, to be honest.
My apologies in advance. This is a
triple-entendre. The primary entendre is that I said I was done posting holiday photographs. The second one is that this sign is the
largest, most prominent feature in the park spanning at least forty feet (13 metres). I used a perspective that shrunk this
considerably leading to the third entendre - it's unreadable.
OK, now things get wierd, or interesting, depending on your point of view. I had a few chances to experiment
a bit and there's nothing more fun than experimenting at an amusement park. I didn't have a tripod or a flash (other than
on-camera) but I didn't let that stop me. First up, a complete abstract based on a spinning ride. This was shot handheld at
ƒ2.8 for 6/10 of a second at ISO 800.
Next up, a more deliberate shot of the carousel. This time, I braced the camera on a metal rail. This was
shot at ƒ32 for ½ s, also at ISO 800. I should have taken the ISO down to 100 and shot it at ƒ16, but I was a little pressed
for time. Anyway, I really like this shot because the woman in front stayed still long enough to be rendered in profile. I
like the motion on the carousel itself and the reflections in front.
Last up, an experiment that I got right a little too late to get a person in it. The kids really like the
Tilt-A-Whirl. It's basically a variation on spinning teacups, but the cups move around an uneven track. Have you ever tried
to take a picture of someone on this kind of ride? It's pretty tricky.
I get usable shots by being very careful to keep a fast shutter speed (this is when you really need your shutter
priority setting - keep it on a least one over 2 times the focal length you are using. For example, I had an 80-200mm lens
on, so I'd take 1 / 2 x (200) for 1/400 s as a bare minimum). The shutter speed is there to ensure that you freeze the fastest
motion you can. You'll need to shoot pretty wide open to get that speed unless it's daylight. It would be far better to do
it a few stops down from wide open. And then you have to track the subjects on spinning carts with other carts flying in front
of you.
So then, how do you get this picture?
This was a 1 second exposure at ƒ5.6 and 24mm - the widest my lens will go. It was shot at ISO 800 with the
addition of on camera flash. It's actually not a very hard picture to take, but it's a method shot, not a technical shot.
Let me explain the concept behind this.
The thing that makes this shot easy is a
flash synchronization mode called
second curtain sync. When you take a flash photograph on a camera with a selectable
curtain sync, you get to choose whether the flash fires at the beginning of the picture or at the end. It really doesn't matter
how it is set until the time of the exposure gets long enough. For example, let's say you take a one second photo of a Tilt-A-Whirl
cup. If you have
first curtain sync set, the flash will fire as soon as you press the shutter. The remainder of the
exposure (the vast majority of the 1 second) will be exposed with whatever natural light is around. If you use
second
curtain sync, the opposite happens. You get a one-second, natural light exposure with a flash burst at the very end just
before the shutter closes.
The second trick you need to pull this off is called pre-focusing. The nice thing about my lenses is that
you can turn off the autofocus with a switch on the lens. So here's what you do: put on a wide-angle lens, between 24mm and
38mm. Turn the autofocus on and select the center focus point (usually the best sensor). Follow some Tilt-A-Whirl cups as
they run in front of you until you get a focus beep. Stop everything you are doing and set the camera to manual focus. Set
the lens to between ƒ5.6 and ƒ16. Use a lower aperture if you have on-camera flash, and the higher one if you have a shoe-mount
flash. Now, whenever you take a picture of the Tilt-A-Whirl track, you'll have front-to-back sharpness (or close to it).
That doesn't mean the picture will be sharp - you can still move the camera around too much and stuff, but it's much, much
better.
To combine the two tricks, you set the camera to manual exposure mode and select
bulb exposure at whatever aperture you picked above, with second curtain sync.
The flash is going to go off when you stop taking the photo. So when you see your best mate or partner whirling
around towards you, point the camera to where they will be when they are right in front of you and start taking the picture.
Hold the shutter in until their cup is in front of you and simply let go of the shutter. The flash will fire all over their
delighted faces, then the exposure will end. It's much, much easier to time that than to try to follow the cup around on autofocus.
And that gives the photo above. Parts of the cup are in very sharp focus because of the wide angle, closed
down aperture and flash illumination. You can see the flare from the flash in the upper left corner. Parts of the cup are
not sharp, though, because the cup is actually moving pretty quickly. Not around the track, necessarily, but around it's own
axis. So that motion shows up around the edges where the flash did not overpower all the other illumination. The rest of the
scene is rendered in an impressionistic way because I was hand-holding the camera for a second. If you look at the bright
colored lights in the background, you can see the path I took - an oddly sort of rectilinear circling of a point. But the
people in the background come out great - not identifiable but contributing to the atmosphere considerably.
The backstory here is that of course by the time I got all these modes set on my camera, the ride was ending
so I couldn't get the shot I wanted of the riders. Next trip.
