Turning Night into Day: Tampa Railfanning on a Dark, Moonless Night

An evening of railfanning Tampa CSX locals on a dark, moonless night.
The Amtrak Silver Star (P092) backed into Tampa Union Station just before sunset on December 13, 2023, and after dark many Tampa locals appeared at various locations west of Tampa's Yeoman Yard. The evening hours between 5 and 9 PM are busy most weeknights, with regular daily trains serving customers on the A Line (CSX Y295), the Clearwater sub to Drew Park (L755), the S-Line and Hookers Lead (Y293), and Conrad-Yelvington on the Neve Spur (L778).
Night shooting of trains isn't easy, even with bright streetlights and commercial lighting often found at railroad crossings. Most cameras and phones can't record much detail, and night video usually comes out dark, with little to no shadow detail. Areas lit by streetlights and car headlights may get enough exposure, but outside those areas most cameras only record grainy noise that can't be brightened much in post-processing.
To get better low-light performance, auto-exposure cameras and phones may slow the shutter speed to 1/40s or so, which results in a blurry image of the train. As a result, many night railfanning videos show the train as little more than a dark blur.
For this video, I used a full-frame Canon R8 which has an excellent low-light performance sensor, along with an extremely 'fast' and sharp Venus Laowa 33mm f0.95 APO lens which helps the camera to see in the dark. The lens has a 'cinematic' flare rendition when pointed at a bright light such as a locomotive headlight: an interesting 'volcanic' red ring appears, which many KZbin lens reviewers have commented that they particularly like and seek out.
Shutter speeds were kept as high as possible, 1/125s when the train was close to the camera, to allow sharp detail to be captured if you pause or freeze-frame the video. A challenge of night railfanning video is to get clean, low-noise video at shutter speeds high enough to record sharp detail on a moving train.
The camera's gain was raised to as much as ISO 16,000, and the resulting video was de-noised using the Neat video plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro. This combination allowed for very dark scenes to be rendered into relatively clean, noise-free video, and is about the limit of how far the R8's excellent sensor can be pushed in low light.
Each clip was carefully adjusted for tonal balance and color saturation to bring out the detail and color of the scenes. A particular challenge is that the exposure levels are quite different before the train's brilliant headlight passes, as opposed to after the locomotive passes - as the rest of the train has considerably less light falling on it.
To compensate for the locomotives' bright headlights, I close the aperture of the lens down as the train approaches, and as it passes I open it up rapidly in real-time. In post-processing I adjust the before- and after-locomotive clips separately, and cross-fade them for a smooth transition.
As a result, the night video looks more like daytime railfanning video, with a full tonal range and colors that are rich and vibrant. In my video before developing these techniques using auto-exposure, after the train's headlight passed, the train would become a dark, grainy mess and I'd lose the detail on the locomotive and first few cars, until the camera slowly compensated the exposure. The exposure adjustment must be done manually, by eye, much faster than the camera can do it.
The R8 has excellent white-balancing when using with White-Priority Auto White Balance, and further adjustments were made in post-processing to achieve more natural-looking color.
The location of the final sequence of Y293 at East Adamo Drive near Trans-Flo Yard was particularly challenging to white-balance, as most of the lighting is orange-yellow sodium-vapor highway lights on the nearby Selmon Connector and Expressway. I was able to achieve a compromise white-balance for which doesn't show the scene as primarily orange.