A tad late, but at least this image is genuinely from yesterday. On the train from Vienna to Carinthia I asked this young man if it was OK for me to take some images of him. He agreed and soon seemed in working mode again, quite oblivious to me.
I used my newly acquired Nikon 50/1.2 for the shots. It was already after sundown, the compartment illuminated only by the guy’s laptop screen and a dim reading lamp. It is quite amazing that I was able to shoot handheld at f1.2, 1/30s and ISO 500.
This is, aside of the Lensbaby, my first fully manual lens, and even if depth of field is incredibly shallow, it is very easy to handle. I have programmed the D200’s FUNC button to let me set lens data. When I press the button, I can use the two command dials to set focal length and maximum aperture. After changing lenses, it takes a second and then the camera correctly meters, and even more important, it measures focus and, if the selected focus point actually is in focus, indicates this in the viewfinder. That’s accurate, convenient, and leaves nothing to wish for. I love this camera 🙂
News of yesterday would be old news, thus there is no Story of the Day. As regards songs about trains, I get plenty of hits when I only search for the word in my music folder, and that covers only filenames. The train seems to be one of the more popular metaphors in songwriting. Now, it’s an impossible job to identify “the” prototypic train song, so while Tom Wait’s “Train Song” from “Frank’s Wild Years” is an obvious choice, we will at least look at a non-obvious but gorgeous cover version by Holly Cole, live on her incredible concert album “It Happened One Night”. Don’t let the hollow sound of the audio sample at Amazon fool you, I own the CD and it sounds immaculately.