Re: Valley RR Steam Day and Night NNG

Thanks Kevin. 4 Light set-up, 3 large studio strobes and one bank of standard camera flash units. One E640 to the left just out of frame, a second out of frame to the right aimed to skim the front of the loco and the third out of frame to the right aimed to skim the front of the station building. The camera strobes are behind the building shining in the window. The large lights are not TTL, I wish they were as I can handle TTL flash just fine. The triggers on the studio lights are built in and not really made for this application. It can be a challenge to get the lights where I want them and have them fire; I'm still working on a solution for that. I'll get it eventually, just a matter of how much $$ I want to throw at the problem. I started with Nikon's TTL trigger method for the camera strobes, but it is IR based and therefore only good for line of sight at a limited distance. I got Phottix radio triggers which are better than the IR ones, but they still don't get around dense objects (like loco boilers, tenders, etc). I don't think there are any triggers that are going to do what a nighttime RR photog wants as they aren't really designed for the distances involved.
Setting the large lights takes some practice, I've tried a flash meter and that will get me close but experience is the best teacher. Take a shot and look at it, make some power and/or location adjustments and try again. A little harder to do in this situation with 4 trains per night. The shot I presented is the final lighting ratio that took 2 or 3 times out to fine tune. I would turn down the strobes firing into the station but otherwise I'm satisfied.
Feel free to e-mail or call if you'd like more info.