Mattison Field, Concord, MA

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.)

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.

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.

These are some children having fun in Rings Fountain, part of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which, as part of the Big Dig project, replaced a truly hideous elevated freeway that sliced through the heart of Boston.

This is part of the Greenway know as the Great Room, which has at its core a “lighted, choreographed fountain shooting 30 to 40 feet in the air designed by Wet Design. The 64 nozzles are set in three circles of rose-colored stone inlaid at surface level. Since each nozzle works independently, there are innumerable design configurations possible with the jets of spray. The fountain is air powered vs. water-pressure powered, so the result is a light spray.” More info available here in this PDF.

Taken as part of the one-year anniversary photowalk of the Boston, Massachusetts, Flickr group. (Thanks to Greg for organizing this!)

I really love the details brought out by the light reflected in the water. Kind of a cool effect, I think.

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.

The 72-foot, 3-deck ship is run by Massachusetts Bay Lines and is a replica of an old-time steamboat. It actually does not use steam for power, though it does use a paddlewheel.

I saw this vessel from a distance while wandering along Fort Point Channel in Boston, seeing what I could see and taking photos. The ship was so full of golden light and detail amidst the darkness of the harbor that I just had to try and get a shot.

This proved more difficult than I had at first thought, as I needed a fairly long exposure, and the boat was rocking ever so slightly in the water. So I experimented and took around 15 exposures at varying lengths of exposure.

This is the sharpest among all of those shots with the exposure fairly even across the whole frame, though it’s still a bit soft around the center of the exposure. I tried to compensate for this a bit by lowering the exposure a bit in this area and sharpening using Adobe Lightroom, so it’s not super noticeable in the smaller sizes.

In any case, I liked the light and color and sharpness in the rest of the frame so much that I just had to post it, despite the lack of sharpness in some areas of the boat itself.

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.