Our year in photos: Richard's most memorable shot of 2024

1 day ago 3

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Beyer-Garratt 143 passes through Nantmor halt, southbound on the Welsh Highland Railway

Fujifilm 16-55mm F2.8 LM WR II @ 19.3mm | F6.4 | 1/1000 sec | ISO 5000
Photo: Richard Butler

After a frankly overwhelming 2023, this year has been one that's helped me re-connect with my love of photography.

A couple of trips back to the UK have certainly helped with this. Despite nominally being on vacation, it's always tempting to use trips home as a means of building up 'real-world' time on a camera, or take the literal change of scenery as a way to add variety to our sample galleries. It was still something of a surprise to notice that none of the images I narrowed my choice down to were taken in Seattle.

My final choice was as much about the experience of shooting it as the image itself. It was taken during a five-day hike across North Wales, because that seemed like a sensible thing to do in late October.

"It was taken on day three of a five-day hike across North Wales"

Day three of the trip had included the first serious downpour and our spirits were a little overcast as we stopped for lunch. Our break was interrupted by the distant sound of a steam train's whistle, and suddenly I made the connection to the stream of smoke we'd seen trailing across the Glaslyn valley, from a high vantage point earlier in the day.

Another hour's walk and our route finally crossed the hilariously narrow-gauge tracks of the Welsh Highland Railway, at Nantmor halt. A search of the station showed no sign of a timetable, and roaming data wasn't in any hurry to convey the information but eventually we found that a southbound train was due at the station just north of us in about ten minutes' time.

This gave my companion a chance to rest his legs and me enough time to set up the camera for the train's arrival. Could I possibly take both a video and a photo of a train that wasn't necessarily going to stop? I'd need to change the camera settings pretty rapidly to achieve both.

Thankfully I knew that 'Movie Optimized Control' mode on the X-T5 would ensure that none of the exposure settings would carry across from video mode to stills, so that I didn't try to capture a photo of a moving train at 1/48 seconds or shoot video at 1/1000th.

Fleeting patches of sunshine meant five minutes of anxiously adjusting the vari ND on the front of the lens, but also meant there was a decent level of contrast when the train finally appeared.

I captured some 22 seconds of video of the train's arrival before hitting stop and frantically unscrewing the ND filter from the front of the lens. I then managed about three backward steps and to quickly zoom the lens out before hitting the shutter.

The result is a surprisingly decent shot of the Manchester-built, ex South African Railways 2-6-2+2-6-2T Garratt loco. Or a train that "looks like a sad one-eyed monster" as a friend described it.