Red Line at Kendall Square / MIT, originally uploaded by briburt.
Content
I’ve always loved subways — the play of dark and light, the lines and constant comings and goings, the rushing motion of the trains — and since I’ve moved to the Boston area, I’ve enjoyed exploring the MBTA’s “T” system to capture some of this experience in a visually compelling way.
A find myself becoming increasingly more fascinated with capturing motion blur of moving objects in a composition that includes a vanishing point. Who knows why? But this is my latest attempt at capturing this.
The hardest thing about this particular shot was waiting for the platform to be empty enough, as I thought that having too many people on the platform would be distracting.
Technique
This was a handheld shot using my Nikon D90 and a Sigma 10-20 lens at 10mm, which I find gives a very cool vanishing point perspective for certain kinds of shots.
The thing about the 10mm focal length is that you have to get right up on top of something to make sure that it is in the foreground. In this case, the train was almost right next to me when I took this shot, but the 10mm perspective pulls the view way back.
Once I got the shot into Adobe Lightroom, I did a minor crop to bring the front of the train a bit closer to the foreground, added a black vignette, and upped the color vibrance and contrast to bring out the lines of the moving train and the yellow of the caution line on the platform.