It was Wednesday morning and I just woke up and realised that the due date for submission for the club entries is that evening and I’ve not taken a long exposure photo. I went out in the cold and took some photos of cars travelling on the highway. While I was standing in the cold, I realised that the photos in not coming out as well as I was hoping. An idea than surfaced as to a shot I’ve wanted to take for ages.
I use the Gautrain on a daily basis to and from work. Always when I wait for the train, I imagine photos that I want to take. The one photo that seems to get stuck in my mind the most often is the one where a person is waiting for the train and the train passes them. It is one thing to think about the photo and another to actually get the energy to take the photo.
One of the biggest challenges for a photo like this is to find only one person to use as a subject, especially at the times I use the train. What I did was when I arrived at the Rosebank station at 7 o’clock in the morning is I used the other line that travels to Pretoria. It is not as busy that time of the morning.
I used my trusty little Canon Powershot G1 X pocket camera and set the exposure time to just less than a second and the ISO at 100. The resultant aperture value was then f/5.0 which is sufficient depth of field on the small sensor of the G1 X.
Because the security guards at the Gautrain station are a little over eager, I tried not be too obvious at what I’m doing. I waited around 10 minutes for the train to arrive, the whole time hoping and praying that an interesting subject / passenger will arrive. I was in luck in that just before the train arrived, a young lady came and stood in front of me.
What usually happens is that the train on the further tracks arrive first, closely followed by the near train. As the furthest train arrived, I decided to take a test shot just to make sure that there is enough movement in the photo. I went down low on my haunches and kept the little camera close to my body to try and negate any movement in the camera itself as I did not have a tripod.
I saw from the test shot that there was sufficient movement and all I had to do was wait for the train to arrive. But that is when my luck ran out. As the train arrived, the lady started moving away and out of my shot. Because I was on my haunches I could not move fast enough to follow her and that left me with no shot. I wanted to cry.
When I finally imported the images from the mornings shoot on my computer, I saw that the test shot actually wasn’t that bad and quite useable.
In post processing I changed the exposure slightly. I also underexpose my image in RAW as I found that it is much easier to bring in detail in the shadows than it is to recover detail in the whites. I worked on the contrast, blacks and whites to make the tonal range a little greater. The actual monochrome conversion was done in Silver EFex Pro 2.
And that was it. I am a little surprised at the reception I’ve received on the image. It just goes to show that it is not always the well planned out shoots that work. I love street photography and this was a great learning curve for me.
Nico Strydom 4*
July 2013; Best of event, Senior Winner, 4 Star winner
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