Drove high-speed train for the first time in my life on 24th of February and brought my DSLR Camera. Here's some of the pictures I took.
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First picture taken while travelling the HSR from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Exposure time: 1/400 sec, ISO speed: 200, Aperture: f/2.8. Wtf was I doing?
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Second try. ISO changed to 100. Of course it has to be 100, it's in the middle of the day! Exposure is still way too high, but the camera actually managed to capture a somewhat sensical photo. Shutter speed can still get higher. Train is still accelerating at this point.
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Shutter speed is now 1/1600 sec. Is damn bright today.
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Now at 1/2000 sec. Objects close to the railway are almost clear, so I'm satisfied with this setting. Exposure is still a notch too high, but hard to manage when moving so fast. My Canon 50D can shoot at speeds up to 1/8000 sec, but didn't want to set it that high as I would probably have to increase ISO and thus, make more digital noise. Not that it would be a problem of course.
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This is one of the things I'd say my camera set up excels at: High speed capture. Sitting on a Train moving around 280-300 kmph in between stops makes it hard to set the camera right before taking a picture as any target would move out of sight pretty quickly.
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Many interesting sights come up during the HSR trip. Taiwan is not exactly a homogeneous place.
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Am quite surprised of the outcome of taking pictures of the city behind this bridge.
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Still sitting inside the train.
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Oh yeah. Now you know how it looks on the inside too, the 700T.
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I could probably find out some of the locations I'm taking pictures of, looking at dates from the EXIF data, but it's too late for that right now. (I guess I've gotten a bad habit of writing in the middle of the night lately.)
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I think this would be one of Taiwan's science parks. They produce a lot of electronics here if I'm not mistaking this factory. Might very well be that at least a few of the components in whatever device you're viewing this blogpost with originate from this place. It's Taiwan after all.
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The science park has some art too.
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I don't know why, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about long and straight roads look down upon from a bridge. Taiwan has many of those.
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Oh. We arrived. Took almost exactly 1.5 hour, just as promised.
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The station in Zuoying looks like an airport to me. Zuoying is currently the southernmost stop on the THSR. It refers to Zuoying District in Kaohsiung. The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation plans to build one slightly further into Kaohsiung, but it's probably going to be a while as the corporation is still fighting with finances.
Actually the HSR is a relatively new thing in Taiwan. It started operating at January 2007, so it's only 3 years since people had to take the normal train if they wanted to get to Kaohsiung from Taipei. A trip that would take about 4.5 hours. Cut 3 times short. Damn, this train is awesome. The price down to Kaohsiung (from Banqiao, reserved seat, standard class) was a little over 1000 NT$, and back again a little lower. 1000 NT$ is about 31 US$ or 170 DKK. For a Taiwanese price I'd say not exactly cheap. Compared to a trip with Danish snail train that's never on time, those 335.5 km are dirt cheap. Same trip would probably be at least triple cost, money- and time-wise.
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