An Evening Train Journey Through The Midlands of Ireland

I had a short trip by train to Galway on wednesday evening, and the light as we passed through the midlands of Ireland was particularly beautiful. While I hadn't intended it to be a photographic exercise, I of course had a camera with me! While we sped past fields and cows, I tried my luck to get a few shots out the window of the train. This might seem like a straightforward endeavour, but there are a couple of things that make this quite difficult. Firstly, the train is travelling quite fast, so you need to have a high shutter speed. And, I do mean high. After a little trial and error, I settled on a 2000th of a second. Even at this the very foreground was still a little blurred.

The second issue was that the light, while beautiful, was beginning to fade, so the levels were quite low. This would require a high ISO. Normally I don't like to shoot above 1600, but I had to push it to 3200 to maintain the shutter speed and keep the images sharp. Remarkably they actually turned out pretty well, and fairly clean. I was using my Nex-7 which some people claim has poor high iso performance, but I was shooting away at 3200 and the images are perfectly useable. They have a little noise, but it just looks like nice grain. I was impressed. Anyway, that's enough of the technical talk, here are some of the shots I got from the comfort of my train seat (by the way, if you are wondering why the panoramic crop, it's because some of the foreground elements were less than pleasant, and they were still a little blurred.)

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