Trainviews Photoseries

Trainviews is a little project I did during my train trip on the Connecting Europe Express in September 2021. This train brought me all the way from Lisbon to Bratislava while visiting a different city every day in just 9 days time. I wrote a separate article with lots of images on this trip on my website.

The project 'trainviews' came onto my mind a few days into the trip. As I was spending many hours in the train every day and I was often sitting in coach that was half empty, I thought it was an interesting idea to basically just set up my tripod in the train pointing out of the window and trying to catch interesting scenery along the way. As we were crossing many different landscapes these 9 days in the train I wanted to create a series showing the different sceneries.

A beautiful sunrise with mist in the countryside

A typical Italian landscapes with the Cyprus trees and a little church. Timing for this shot was spot on!

A little vineyard right next to the traintrack.

Using a slower shutter speed created a motion blur effect.

Rain in the alps in Austria. Fun fact: During my 9 days in the train this was the only time we saw some rain.

The North of Italy and Austria was the most beautiful part of rail I crossed during my trip with often spectacular mountain views from the window.

'Teletubby' hills with puffy clouds makes for such pleasing scenery.

Different kind of hills with typical Italian trees.

Sometimes we would arrive late evening. This was a long exposure shot of us arriving in a station.

A little group of Italian houses.

The goal of this series is to show the beauty along the rail way in Europe. Train travel is fast, comfortable and sustainable and the great thing is that you can do work along the way while enjoying the 'trainviews'.

Technical difficulties while shooting this series:

- Timing: This was the most difficult thing. As you can see in the photos I managed to get some objects right in the middle of the window. These were very difficult to 'catch' as the train was mostly moving quite fast. My timing for these photos needed to be perfect. I didn't use 'burst mode' on the camera, as even then the timing could be slightly off. I simply waited for the perfect moment to press the shutter.

- Shutter speed: To avoid blur in the photos (except for the ones where I wanted the blur for an artistic effect) I needed to use a super fast shutter speed. In general I would underexpose the images allowing me to use faster shutter speed. I also slightly bumped up the ISO to get an even faster shutter speed. The result was mostly images shot at a shutter speed of around 1/800 to 1/1000 of a second so the image was sharp.

- Reflections: It was not always possible to shoot as reflections in the windows were sometimes too strong. In general, it was okay. I removed some annoying reflection in postprocessing in some of the images.

Setup used: Sony A7RIV with Sony 12-24GM Wideangle lens.

This side project was done while on the train with the Connecting Europe Express to promote the 2021 EU Year of Rail.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the photos!

Albert