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.)

This is a night shot of the "Great Dome" and columns of Building 10 (The Maclaurin Building) on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as seen from the south side of Memorial Drive. The red and orange-ish/white streaks in the foreground are the headlights and tail lights of cars passing by on Memorial Drive.

I was out last Saturday wanting to get night shots of the Boston skyline across the Charles River, and I was so focused on looking south that I wasn’t looking the other direction and almost missed this shot. Just goes to show that you should always turn away from whatever it is you set out to do, and you might just find something more interesting staring you right in the face.

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.

Another shot of the Boston skyline taken from the Moakley Bridge (which is the bridge with the blue lights on the left) over the Fort Point Channel. I was standing on one of the small viewing platforms they’ve built for pedestrians right over the water.

That’s the Northern Avenue bridge on the right, and the two tallest buildings are One International Place and Two International Place.

I wasn’t quite sure how this one would turn out, as the lighting was very strange with the strong blue floodlights on the Moakley Bridge sort of overpowering everything else in the scene. So I underexposed the frame slightly in the camera. Then, after I brought it into Lightroom, I brightened up some of the underexposed areas, put in some fill light for the foreground, and dialed back the saturation levels of the blue lights on the bridge, and I’m fairly happy with how the exposure turned out overall. I think it really gives you a pretty strong sense of what it’s like to see this skyline from this vantage point — sort of like standing inside a jewel box of city lights.

Another dusk shot of the Moakley Bridge in Boston bathed in that wonderful blue light that I love so much. Don’t know why they have the blue floodlights on the bridge, but it certainly does catch my eye when I’m there.

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.

Yup. More light trails.

Taken on a stroll up the Charles River in Cambridge around the Longfellow Bridge on a chilly February evening.

Blue Fireworks – New Year’s Eve 2009, Boston Common, originally uploaded by briburt (Brian Burt Photo).

We went down to some of Boston’s “First Night” celebrations on and around the Boston Common on New Year’s Eve this year (or I guess I should say “last year,” as it was still 2009). The weather was (relatively) warm (not like last year, when it was -5 degrees F), so i brought my camera to try and get some shots of the fireworks they set off on the Common at midnight Greenwich Mean Time (i.e. 7pm Eastern Standard Time).

I think this is one of the better shots that came out of this little shoot. I liked how the shot managed to capture the big long blue streaks together with some of the orange/gold color of the next bit, as well as the silhouetted outline of a bit of the downtown Boston skyline.

It was fun to experiment around with different exposures, but the fireworks were happening so fast that it was pretty hard to check the results as I was working.

I found in general that setting the camera to manual mode (but leaving autofocus on), and then setting the f-stop to between f7 and f11 and then setting the exposure between 2 and 5 seconds yielded the best results. You definitely need a tripod for this, by the way.

If I were to do anything differently, I would make sure that I was more upwind from the inevitable smoke and that I was better positioned to capture more of the skyline with the shot, but overall I think the results were satisfactory — and I had fun to boot!

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.

This is the final photo in a series of black & white shots I took of the Boston Financial District skyline as I was wandering around the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway one night last summer. This is such a great location from which to make images: lots of fantastic skyline light, fountains galore, and also some night life to boot.

Of the three decent images I got from this spot, this is my favorite, as I think it really captures the energy of the fountain together with that sparkling light, so that you felt like you were standing inside a jewel box.