The Way

This is one of the many photos I shot out of Caltrain last week, zooming up from Mountain View to San Francisco. On the one hand, it was fertile grounds for photos of people: People tend to be unguarded, bored, or frustrating when commuting, particularly when you shoot through a train window as you pull up to their station.
On the other, Caltrain windows are filthy. The windows are constraining, and shooting off at the edges introduces unacceptable optical falloff. Some number of Caltrains now actually have spray-painted ads on the windows (better than not having Caltrain, but not better than not getting the picture). I also rode the semi-mini-bullet, meaning it tended to be faster than the much slower train on the weekends (Shutter speeds of 1/800-1/1000s recommended). Metering on patches of light on people's faces was pretty hard -- particularly as they zip by. By the end of the week, I was starting to record exposure values for various stations...

But doing this exercise for four days in a row lead me to some interesting photos, and being presented with the same problem day in and day out, knowing there was something there was a fun challenge. I'll be posting some of my favorites this week.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it up to the city this weekend -- oncall, and trying to get over the last vestiges of this stupid head cold everyone seems to have.