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.

Taken on the commuter rail platform at the MBTA’s Porter Square station in Cambridge, MA.

This was at the end of an afternoon-long photowalk wandering around Cambridge, near MIT and the Charles River, on which I was feeling a bit down on myself about my photography, but I just kept on shooting, even when I felt like sticking the camera in my bag, and I eventually came out of it. Nothing like actually making some photographs to bring you out of a creative funk.

Hadn’t pulled out my 50mm f1.4 lens for awhile, and I’d forgotten how much I like the way it forces you to zoom with your feet and get in there close.

One thing I really liked about this shot was the contrast between the colorful, sharp words on the sign with the almost ghostly figures on the platform — something that I actually set out to achieve with the shot from the start (rather than just discovering that it had happened randomly only after I had gotten all the photos uploaded to my Mac.)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Another in a series of black and white explorations of cityscapes at night, this one taken near one of the fountains on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston. Hard to believe that it was not that long ago that this shot would not even have been possible, as there was the double-decker freeway of I-93 cutting right through the heart of this area. So I guess that, despite the cost, the Big Dig was a Good Thing in the long term.

I’m always overwhelmed with sensation as I wander about at night with my camera and tripod. In this shot, I was trying to capture a bit of tension between the movement and energy of the fountain mixed with the more traditional stateliness of the Custom House Tower in the background. Still, I’m not totally happy about the composition here. Seems a bit off to my eye somehow, but it is what it is at this point.

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.