The Ghosts of Durrow
Jul, 2016Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in a retired train tunnel near a tiny village called Durrow in County Waterford, Ireland. The tunnel was renovated recently to become part of a 24 km Greenway stretching from Dungarvan to Waterford city. As you can see, the tracks have been removed and new lights have been installed in the alcoves.Time
I shot at around 4 pm on a overcast Summer's day, which is fairly common in Ireland :)Lighting
The end of the tunnel was blazingly bright compared to inside. I did consider taking a sequence of bracketed shots to create a final High Dynamic Range image, but there wasn't really anything of interest to capture outside so I stuck with a single shot. Since it was very dark in the tunnel, a long exposure shot was the natural choice to capture the fantastic spectrum of browns and reds in the brick walls.Equipment
Canon 80D on a tripod, Tokina 11 - 16 mm lens at 14 mm, ISO100, 25 second exposureInspiration
The tunnel had only recently been cleared, and the renovations also included new alcove lighting, which was almost invisible when looking down the tunnel. The new Greenway that passed through the tunnel was extremely busy, so I knew there would be lots of foot and bicycle traffic passing through. This meant I would have lots of "ghosts" for my long exposure shot.Editing
I always do my post-processing in Adobe Lightroom. I bumped up the shadows, added noise reduction, and tweaked the colours to really emphasise the browns and reds in the bricks.In my camera bag
Canon 80D, Sigma 28 - 70 mm 2.8 lens, Tokina 11 - 16 mm 2.8 lens, 2x 128 Gb CF cards, 2x 64 Gb CF cards, 2x 32 Gb CF cards, 4 LP-E6 batteries, Set of Ranger Neutral Density screw-in filters, Variable ND filter (for video), cleaning cloth, cleaning pen,Feedback
Play with the duration of your long exposure shot to get varying amounts of detail and trails in the moving elements. You can up the ISO to bring down the exposure duration and make the moving elements more substantial, or go for a very long duration in order to render moving elements almost invisible. When I was shooting in the tunnel, it was more than dark enough to require an exposure time of 25 seconds, but if you're outside in the daylight, you're going to need a fairly dark Neutral Density filter to slow down your exposure. I use an ND1000 filter as a starting point outside.
