National Railway Museum

Back in May I visited the National Railway Museum in York, this is a wonderful place to visit, if like me, you’re interested in things like the industrial revolution, engineering in general or of course railway history. I took my X-T1 with me together with the XF35 f1.4, Xf56 f1.2 and XF18-55 f2.8-4 but I enjoyed using the 35mm so much I somehow completely forgot to use either of the other two lenses!

I shot everything in jpeg fine only as I didn’t want to do any editing at all – I find I shoot this way more and more these days, it’s so liberating and something I could never do with my Canon DSLRs. Wherever I went and whatever I was shooting I always shot in RAW only and would then spend hours editing and developing which took all the fun out of what I was trying to achieve.

I was also pretty much limited to ISO800 and below, rarely going any higher in an effort to keep images clean. The above shot was at ISO1600 and even though the conditions were very dark and dingy the areas in focus are crisp and clear. I’m no longer ‘afraid’ to bump the ISO up, ISO3200 is perfectly useable.

I shot this detail of a coupling at ISO800 at f2 and was very pleased with the rendition and detail.

I’m a sucker for beautiful engineering and the copper work here was simply outstanding. The skill and craftsmanship that went into this!

I really loved the way the light filtered down through the roof onto these people, taking the weight off for five minutes.

This area is what the museum simply calls “The Warehouse” and is stuffed with amazing things. I could spend many hours in there marvelling at the many thousands of items, including a working scale model of a Deltic engine:

finally here is another high ISO shot on the footplate of a beautiful old loco

You can see the rest of my images from the day here