It’s birthday portrait time again in my household, as my oldest has recently completed yet another trip around the Sun.
Birthday portraits are a fount of contrasts, in particular the ecstasy of transcendent visions of images to be and the agony of failing to realize them. Often, with that form of l’esprit de l’escalier unique to photography, the photographer realizes when importing images into Lightroom that if he’d only squatted instead of standing up he’d have made a much better picture, or something like that.
But this is not a tale of woe, my dear readers; no, this is a tale of agony transmuted into ecstasy when a vision was (mostly) realized satisfactorily. On with the image:
John, like his mother and grandfather, is a railfan. He loves trains, anything and everything about trains. Of course he has a model train setup, in N scale because our house is small. He got a new engine for his birthday, too, and I knew I wanted a picture of him with his railroad, wearing an engineer hat and bandanna. I also knew I didn’t just want to throw an umbrella or octabank in front of him and call it a day; something edgier and more interesting was called for.
After a couple weeks of thought I got the idea of a long exposure with his trains while they were running, with a grid spot (my favorite restricted light source) on his face. I like long exposures in general, and this shot would mix strobe with continuous light and some light painting from the movement of the model trains.
Further, I’d been rereading David Hobby’s Lighting 103 course and was reminded that very few light sources are white light sources. This image would have amber and red and green and a bit of blue from the screen on the DCC base station, but no “pure” white light.
Having figured out the light, the next problem was composition. John’s room is small and crowded, and the trains are on a piece of plywood mounted under a loft bed. The arrangement of the room leaves one and only one good angle to shoot from, long ways down the bed towards the west windows. Those windows are a huge problem because they will utterly blow out any long exposure.
I solved the windows both by waiting until evening to photograph and by draping a large piece of black velvet around the bed frame. Initially, I thought about having John lean over the trains with a lantern, but that position was awkward and cramped and he was too far away from the trains. By having him kneel next to the board with his elbows next to the track, that put him close enough to establish a relationship between man and machine.
John has a Metra (Chicago suburban) passenger train and a freight train with three different engines he can use. In the picture above, the Metra train is running on the outer track, making one revolution of the track every 8 seconds or so. At f/11 the light levels looked good, so my exposure was 8″ @ f/11 @ ISO 800.
The room was too crowded to use floorstanding lights, but as luck has it I have a couple of different clamps and stands with built-in clamps. I positioned a strobe with my grid spot using such a stand attached to the leg of the bed nearest him and angled it until it hit his face at the angle I wanted. The trains would take care of themselves.
I set up the camera on a tripod and snapped a few exposures. The strobe did its thing on his face and the lights in his Metra cars painted in the foreground nicely.
Would I do anything differently if I could do it again? Maybe. The DCC base station behind John’s left arm is pretty much fixed in place by where we ran the wires when we originally set up his track. True, the lights on it are actually helping the image by providing separation on his arm and the back of his head, but one could argue that I should either have included more of it as an image element or hid it altogether. I’ll probably never decide which is correct.
Oh, and for you train fans, that UP/CNW engine is running left-hand main, just like in real life. 
That’s all for today. This is Nicholas Haggin, wishing you fair subjects and following light.
Nicholas Haggin Photography 