March 31, 2009

The Mean City Streets

A few weeks ago I met up with a photographer friend of mine who schooled me in using my own camera. He's that good. We met up right after work, so I brought my camera with me to the office that day.

This was during the Mike-as-a-cripple phase of our lives, so naturally he and I drove to work that day. I had just recently gotten my fancy new telephoto zoom lens and wanted to test its image stability. For those of you not as big a photo nerd as I have become, let me just say image stabilization reduces vibration therefor allowing the photographer to take clearer photos. My fancy new lens came with image stabilization and there seemed no better time to test it than in a moving car.

As Mike drove us into work, I snapped photos along the way. Most were highly unimpressive, but once we turned onto Lake Street I knew we'd be under the El. The yellow of the tracks and the intermittent light I thought might result in a cool image, and if I do say so myself, I think it did. It's not the most dynamic image, but I like how it shows a slice of city life early on a Wednesday morning.

2 comments:

Alexis said...

every time you post a new photo it makes me covet your camera more and more and more. my camera sucks. but...seeing as how i barely have time to post the picture i do take, i probably don't have time to learn how to use a new camera.
you just need to come to pittsburgh and take pics of my family! I miss you- and would love to see you even w/o your camera. :)

fotomattic said...

I'm a sucker for slice-of-city-life shots, and this is a good one. It's well composed, which is hard to do in a moving car. And I'm glad you didn't crop out the elements on the right.

I've snapped a number of shots from a car that I ended up liking quite a bit, even if there was more luck involved than usual (I don't have a VR lens ... so jealous).

If you're enjoying photography as much as it seems you are, I'd recommend checking out flickr. I started using it a few months ago just as a place to store the photos I was posting on my photoblog, but soon discovered that the community side of it became a source of both inspiration and encouragement. Frankly, I've gotten a lot out of it that I don't think I would've gotten from the blog alone.