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.

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.

Waiting for the Train to New York, originally uploaded by briburt.

Update: Just learned that this shot is featured as Photo of the Day for 8 December 2009 on Bostonist.com.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately, but I find myself increasingly drawn to black and white photography, especially b/w processing that evokes a sort of timeless, mid-20th century feel. Even though this shot is of a fairly modern train station right outside Boston that serves Amtrak’s high-speed Northeast corridor trains (including the Acela), I thought that this shot had a sort of nostalgic feel to it, as though it could’ve been taken in 1946 just as easily as in 2009.

Anyway, I also did my best to accentuate all of the different kinds of lines — slanting, vertical, horizontal — in the shot by using the black and white processing. The color version just didn’t bring this out. I added a slight vignette to the lower left of the frame to try and encourage the viewer’s eye to slide right down the tracks to the vanishing point.

Overall, I’m quite happy with how this turned out, which is more than I can say for most of my photos.

This shot was an attempt to capture the mood of a New York City Street at night. Of course, this began as a color photo, but as I started playing around with various levels of processing, I quickly realized that the situation almost demanded that it be processed as black and white.

The actual black and white processing was a continual experiment in trying to get the contrast of the scene so that it felt right to my eyes. I really liked the steam coming up out of the manhole cover and the headlights (especially how they were reflected in the steam), and I liked the light reflected off the lines of cars on both sides of the street, so I did my best to bring focus to all of these things.

On a higher level, while I’ve always been interested in black and white photography, I find myself drawn more and more in that direction with most of my photos. There’s a subtlety to the gradations of light that I’m finding more and more appealing than a lot of the highly saturated colors I’ve been focusing on for the past year or so.

We’ll see how that plays out long-term, I guess.

Ghost Train on the Longfellow Bridge, originally uploaded by briburt.

This was made on an evening that was supposed to be a photowalk in Boston for the Boston Photo Peeps group on Meetup.com, but the meetup was canceled at the last minute because of adverse weather, which was quite disappointing to me. (How often does the forecast say 100% chance of rain before it has actually started raining, anyway?)

By the time the meetup was canceled, I had already trekked into Cambridge from Concord with all of photo gear in tow, and I decided that I wasn’t about to turn around and go home on account of a few raindrops (having lived in Seattle for 12 years has tended to make me a bit blasé about precipitation, in any event).

So I decided that I wanted to to try and capture a bit of the Boston or Cambridge skyline in the evening as well as some light trails from traffic or trains, so I tried to think of places that would fit the bill and that would also be close to a Red Line “T” train stop in case I needed to beat a hasty retreat from the rain.

I settled on the Longfellow Bridge, as I had been meaning to get over there for some photos for a while and the Charles/MGH “T” stop is right next to it. By the time, I got my tripod set up on the bridge and my el-cheapo umbrella out, the rain was coming down pretty steadily — to the point where I was a bit worried about getting my equipment too wet. (As many of you may already know, I’m not much of a gearhead about camera equipment, and I assiduously avoid the “religious wars” that frequently erupt between photo gearheads that care more about their brand of gear than they do about actually taking good photos. In the end, I see the camera as a tool — a means to an end — and taking it out into the elements to get a shot doesn’t bother me too much. That said, though, I don’t want to deliberately ruin a good camera, so I do my best to keep the equipment dry and in good working order.)

I’m sure that cars passing by on the bridge must have thought I was nuts for being out there (I am nuts, btw, but for other reasons), but after I got this shot, it all made no difference. I have become more and more fascinated (even obsessed) with the light available at dusk, and this particular combination of light, color, and lines really resonates with something in me — maybe it’s the sense of energy and movement captured or the gloomy atmosphere sliced apart by the light trails. In any case, for once, I am actually happy with all aspects of one of my photos. I hope you all enjoy it as well.

Route 128 Station just outside of Boston, MA

Canal with Drawbridge, originally uploaded by briburt.

This is the canal leading into Seattle’s Hiram M. Chittendon Locks, connecting Puget Sound (salt water) with Lake Union and Lake Washington (both fresh water) via a ship canal. I can bike here in about 10 minutes from my house, so I spent a lot of time down at the locks today, shooting photos and marveling at both the engineering involved and the constant movement and change in the place. Amazing stuff.

(And I don’t mean to belabor a point, put I do really love that Sigma 10-20.)

Seattle Waterfront Streetcar Tracks

Originally uploaded by briburt

I used to love to ride the trolley along the Seattle waterfront, but this is all that remains of those times — some abandoned tracks that run the length of Alaskan Way. King County Metro (the transportation organization) claims that service is only temporarily suspended, but I doubt the streetcar will ever run on tracks along here again any time soon, as there is no longer any place to store the cars at night at the end of the line (they tore down the maintenance sheds when they built the Olympic Sculpture Park).

(And I am really loving my Sigma 10-20, which makes shots like this even possible.)