“Broken down again…”

My 51-year-old Austin 1300 has played the part of ‘breaking down’ for a couple of years now in my period photoshoots. I have even mimicked the Basil Fawlty scene where he gave his own Austin a ‘damn good thrashing’. On this particular day (February 10, 2018) I asked my cousin Luke to put on his old suit and flat cap to look under the bonnet as Britannia No. 70013 Oliver Cromwell thundered along the main line behind him at 75mph. My challenge was the lighting. Unfortunately it was getting dark quite rapidly; the train was held at Worcester for a little longer than usual due to trespassers on the line in the area. This resulted in some final tweaking in the settings and cranking the ISO to 10,000. The beauty of the Nikon D850 sensor is that it is designed for low light, and these conditions didn’t faze the camera one bit. The final image has some grain to it, but that adds detail and also makes it look like the photograph was taken in the 1970s using a film camera. You could argue that Luke was using his lighter to see whether there was any petrol coming through the pipes!

Nikon D850 with Nikon 24-70mm F2.8 lens at 48mm. 1/400 sec F/6.3 ISO 10,000