On Wednesday evening, the 11th January, a photographer friend and I visited the Didcot Railway Centre to photograph a Great Western Region ‘King’ class steam locomotive. Didcot Railway Centre is a railway museum and preservation engineering site in Didcot, Oxfordshire, England. The site was formerly a Great Western Railway engine shed and locomotive stabling point.

We had access to the shed from 6:00 to 10:00pm and so it was very dark inside; the locomotive being illuminated by two floodlights and the ‘steam’ generated by machine. Not knowing what to expect, I took two camera bodies (Leica SL and SL2) and four lenses but ended up by just using the SL2 with the superb 24-90mm SL Vario-Elmarit lens.  All images were taken at 400 ISO, mostly f5.6 and from a half to two seconds exposure.