Storm Front & Light Trails, originally uploaded by briburt (Brian Burt Photo).

Well… so finally I’m getting around to saying a little something about this photo, which seems to have taken on a life of its own on Flickr.com, having somehow attained, and held, the rank of #1 most “interesting” photo on Flickr Explore for July 17, 2010. (See the end of this post for a note on Flickr Explore, if you’re interested.)

A lot of photography is not about gear or technique. It’s about timing and vision. That is, it’s about putting yourself in a good spot to see something from an interesting vantage point when the light and other conditions are good, and being prepared to literally capture that moment when it is given to you and not worrying about whether or not your gear might get damaged in the process.

This happened to me last Friday night.

After having spent a full day in Matt Kloskowski’s Adobe Lightroom 3 seminar in Boston and shlepping my camera bag around all day, I headed over to Cambridge for a light meal and a couple of malted beverages at the Cambridge Brewing Company, timing it so that I would head over to the Charles River near the MIT campus about 40 minutes before dusk.

The weather looked a little iffy, though, as what had been a horrendously hot and muggy day was rapidly turning into a stormy evening with a huge bank of thunderstorms flowing in quickly from the west.

Luckily, I had my iPhone with me, and I fired up the Weather Bug app to have a look at where the storm front was on the radar, and I could literally see it in real time as it was moving in toward Cambridge and Boston.

I didn’t hesitate or even think of turning around and heading home. In fact, I saw the storm as an opportunity to get some interesting photos. So I hurried down to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, which connects Cambridge and Boston, set up my tripod and camera, and starting shooting the bridge, the river, the Boston skyline, the storm front, the Citgo sign by Fenway Park, and anything else I could see.

Thunder and lightning seemed to be moving in disturbingly close, but I was focused and barely noticed. I also reassured myself (probably falsely) that my tripod was carbon fiber rather than metal so perhaps I was marginally safer standing out in the open during a thunderstorm and snapping pictures.

In any event, I’m glad I stuck it out, as this is one of the shots I got — with that storm front sitting heavily on the top of the frame, the gray skyline in the distance, and all of the energy of the traffic moving over the bridge. I loved all of the different lines that were converging in the frame and especially how the bottom of the storm cloud matched up with the top of the street sign.

And of course capturing light trails is something I’m always trying to perfect, and in this instance I got lucky that a bus just happened to be crossing the bridge, so I ended up with multiple levels of trails, which I think adds a lot more energy to the shot.

In any case, I didn’t get too wet, I didn’t get struck by lightning, and my camera gear only got a bit of water on it and seems to have survived the storm.

In the end, it’s only gear — not even close to being as important as the image. I can always replace the gear, but I can never replace the moment.

(Side note on Flickr Explore: the “interestingness” ranking on Flickr is something of a mystery to me. Briefly, it is an automated algorithm that rates and ranks Flickr photos based on factors such as how many people are viewing it and how often, how many people are sharing it and how often, how many people are marking it as a favorite, how many people are commenting on it, whether it is being linked to from outside of Flickr, plus a bunch of other mysterious factors of which I am certain that utter randomness is one. It’s not a popularity contest, and it is not trying to rate the photo’s overall quality — i.e., it’s not trying to say that these photos are the “best” — but rather it is just trying to give people a sense of photos that are “interesting.” It’s all a bit murky to me, and sometimes seems quite random, but there it is. Given that around 5000 photos are uploaded to Flickr every minute and there are over 4 billion photos already there, I guess that anything that brings attention to one of my photos is a good thing, opaque as the whole process might be.)

Marshall Point Lighthouse, Maine, originally uploaded by briburt (Brian Burt Photo).

When we took a mini-vacation up to the Maine coast a couple of months ago, I made a point to seek out as many lighthouses as I could to photograph. This one is Marshall Point Lighthouse near Port Clyde, Maine, and is quite interesting in that it is very accessible. At low tide, you can walk all the way around it on the rocks and even go up and walk out on the wooden walkway to the light house door. (Click here for some more information on Marshall Point Lighthouse.)

Photographing these lighthouses is an enlightening experience for me as I am constantly trying to get to angles that are not just your typical “lighthouse shot” and to see the structure in different ways.

Lighthouses are in and of themselves dramatic structures both in their location and in their function, so shooting them seems like it should be a pretty straightforward affair. But it’s more complicated than it looks, mainly because often the lighthouses are hard to access (surrounded, for instance, by steep drop offs and cliffs) in a way that allows you to get new and interesting views of them.

Lighthouses have also been favorite subjects for visual artists, and most have been photographed or painted many times over, so it’s often hard to get a new view. Luckily, I was helped out by a very unique sky and also by my super wide Sigma 10-20 lens, which at 10mm helps to capture this drama by creating this sort of rush of energy in almost any cloud-filled sky.

On this particular evening, the sky was really quite dramatic, with a storm front being pushed out by a low pressure system. In this photo, you can see the storm clouds moving off to the right, and I wanted to capture both the drama of the sky’s contrast as well as the sharp lines of the walkway to the lighthouse itself, which lead the eye out to the energy of the sky.

An MBTA Red Line train heads into a blazing sunset over the Longfellow Bridge from Boston into Cambridge.

Featured on the MIT Engineering department’s home page.

Took a needed break from the daily grind and headed up to the mid-coast of Maine with my family last weekend and decided it was time to check out some of the lighthouses that dot that part of the New England coast.

This is a shot of one of the better known lighthouses in all of New England — the Pemaquid Point Light Station. (The lighthouse has become so iconic for Maine, that its outline actually graces the U.S. commemorative quarter coin for the State of Maine).

As for the details surrounding this image, it was all very serendipitous — we just happened to be passing close by on our way home so we decided to go for it and stop here for a picnic lunch. It just so happened that the tide was still low, which exposed all of these very cool striated granite rocks and enabled me to climb down the cliff to get this cool angle. And a bonus was that the sky was also very dramatic as rain squalls moved in and out of the area.

The lighting was a bit of a challenge as the sun kept appearing and disappearing and reappearing from behind clouds, but I just shot and shot and shot and experimented with lowering the exposure settings on my camera to ensure that the light in the clouds would not get all blown out.

But the biggest bonus was my wonderful ultra-wide zoom lens: the Sigma 10-20mm. When zoomed all the way out to 10mm, it provides a sort of “rushing to the center” effect between land and sky that is accentuated here by the striations on the rocks and the lines of the sky.

Overall, a very satisfying place to take photos, and with some excellent conditions to obtain the kinds of photos I like to make.

Taken on the Cambridge side of the Charles River near the MIT boathouse while I was just wandering around and wondering if I really should be doing this whole photography thing.

Sunset over Cambridge, Massachusetts, that is.

A panoramic shot that also includes the Longfellow Bridge & Charles River — plus a couple of sailboats heading back to the MIT marina.

I struggled mightily to get the exposure correct on this one, as the sun is generally known to be really quite bright, even when it’s setting. This is one of dozens of shots I took, but this one seemed to be fairly close to capturing the experience of what I was seeing.

Taken from the Longfellow Bridge in that wonderful, warm late afternoon sunlight just before dusk, this photo shows the banks of the Charles River in Boston at pretty much the peak time of the autumnal colors here in New England. The green skyscraper on the right-hand side of the photo is the John Hancock Tower.

I merged this shot together from 9 different portrait (vertical), hand-held exposures using the ever-handy Photoshop, and then brought the new panorama back into Lightroom for cropping and further processing. I really wanted those Fall colors to jump out at the viewer.

I took a number of different panorama shots that day, after having spent the day in the Scott Kelby Photoshop workshop for digital photographers and being inspired by some of the techniques Scott talked about for capturing good panoramas. As I said in my previous post, I really recommend Scott’s workshops for anyone interested in the craft of digital photo processing.

(Also available in poster format at gallery.brianburtphoto.com.)

A Red Line MBTA train reflects the sunset as it crosses the Longfellow Bridge from Boston into Cambridge.

This was merged together as a panorama in Photoshop from 5 different overlapping portrait exposures. I’m completely astounded at the fantastic job Photoshop does of blending together the different shots.

I was inspired to do the panorama (and to process it like this) after a day well-spent in the Scott Kelby Photoshop workshop over at the Convention & Exhibition center. He is the Photoshop ninja-master, and I bow down to both the truly awesome things he can do in Photoshop and to his gift for presenting these complex techniques in a humorous and clear manner. I highly recommend you attend one of his Photoshop or Lightroom seminars, or at least purchase one of his many great Photoshop, Lightroom, and digital photography books. My hat’s off to you, Scott, and thanks!

Autumn Sunset at Walden Pond, originally uploaded by briburt.

If the phrase “Walden Pond” sounds familiar: yes, this is the same Walden Pond made famous in the book Walden, or, Life in the Woods by Concord’s own Henry David Thoreau.

I’m fortunate in that I live just a few miles down the road from Walden Pond in Concord, MA, so I bike by there regularly as well as go over there for a stroll every now and then. The area is wildly popular both with tourists (who make a pilgrimage to Walden to pay respect to Thoreau and his work) and with local folks who just want a peaceful place to hang out, go jogging, take a peaceful walk, or just sit and be. It’s particularly popular with local swimmers as only rowboats are allowed on the water (so there’s no chance that, say, obnoxious watercraft such as jet-skis, will ever be used there).

In any case, I decided to go out to Walden yesterday evening to stroll around the pond around sunset to see what I could see, and maybe take a few photos. This is one of those photos.

(Taken with a fabulous Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens rented from the fabulous folks at LensProToGo across town in Concord — highly recommended to try these guys out if you want to use or try out an expensive lens for a limited time, btw. I’ve been to their new digs, and they definitely have their act together.)

OK. I was up before dawn this morning, photographing the sunrise, and it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit. So what did I do when I got home? Started processing photos of Cape Cod from last summer. Makes sense, I suppose. This is one of those photos.

Had a lot of fun with this one, deliberately breaking the "rule of thirds." To me, "rules" like this exist more as handy guidelines to get me going than hard-and-fast rules.