It’s dusk and too dark for a conventional photograph without boosting the ISO to high levels.
So, I opt for a panned image, where I use a comparatively slow shutter speed and move the camera to follow the motion of the subject.
I’ve found that it helps to pick a point on the vehicle and stay with it.
It also helps to begin panning well before the shutter is released and continue to pan without changing your overall motion after the picture has been made.
This last part is crucial. Many pans are ruined when the photographer stops panning (or slows) at the very moment the shutter is released, which unfortunately can be a natural inclination that must be overcome with practice.
I exposed this pan-image of a SEPTA Route 15 PCC car on Girard Avenue on November 5, 2017.Screen shot showing Lumix LX7 EXIF data including shutter speed, ISO and f-stop.
Yesterday’s post featured contemporary views of MBTA’s Park Street Station in Boston. See: http://wp.me/p2BVuC-4Pk
Today’s post goes back in time.
I made this view of an Arborway-bound PCC car about 1980. I’d exposed the photo using my old Leica 3A with 50mm Summitar, probably on Tri-X processed in Microdol-X.
I scanned this from a print I made back in the day. During that period (1978-1982) I often traveled with my father to Boston and I made a lot of photos of MBTA transit operations. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep precise notes on this print.
Here’s one of the photos displayed yesterday for comparison.
Green Line streetcars use the upper level at Park Street.
PCC car at Kenosha, Wisconsin in July 2016. Detailed view exposed on Ilford FP4 using a Leica 3A with 35mm Nikkor lens. Kenosha, Wisconsin operates a short streetcar circuit between the Metra station and Lake Michigan. This car was originally from Toronto, Ontario.
Recently, the TRAINS Newswire published a story on MBTA’s Mattapan-Ashmont Trolley line warning of the possible demise of the historic PCC cars and possibly of the trolley line itself. (The ‘bus’ word was uttered!)
So, the word is out, if Mattapan-Ashmont Trolley is something you want to see, DON’T Wait.
I recalled an early visit to this line with my father on a May Sunday in 1979. This was back when former Dallas double-ended PCCs dominated operations on the line, and the cars were largely painted red to reflect their operation as an extension of the Red Line.
Today, I find it fascinating to look back on these photos. I couldn’t have anticipated back then that more than 36 years later, old PCCs would still be working the line, albeit with different cars.
This old Type 3 car caught my attention. I’d seen these on the Green Line years earlier and always want to inspect one up close.Since my 1979 visit MBTA eliminated the classic trolley shelter at Mattapan and sent many of the double-ended cars to the scrapper.
However, from strictly a photographic point of view, what is now most interesting to me is that I knew virtually nothing of the ‘rules of photography’ , other than a rudimentary understanding of how to work my father’s Weston Master III light meter and translate the settings it offered to my Leica 3A.
No one had ever told me about three-quarter angles, or where the sun was ‘supposed to be’. Front-lighting, back-lighting, and side-lighting were foreign words. I was blind as to the relative importance of foreground and background, and I didn’t known that ‘good’ photos were only made with Kodachrome, and I knew nothing about the compositional ratios of 2/3s, or any of the other stuff that later influenced my photography.
Here were trolley cars and lots of them. What’s that Green car doing back there I wondered?
Honestly, as record of the scene, my raw unfettered, uninformed approach has a great appeal to me today. Had I known those things, I may have exposed less interesting images.
What you see here are the inspired views of an enthusiastic 12-year old exposed using a Leica with a 50mm Summitar lens on Ektachrome film.
Another view of the snow plow. Too much foreground? Lighting all ‘wrong’, just pitch this one in the bin.If the cars are double-ended, why do they spin them around on a loop. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this.I might not have known what I was doing, but I was visionary. I was fascinated by the ‘heavy rail’ tracks on both sides of the trolley line. Here is evidence that Conrail was still serving the former New Haven branch as far as Milton. There’s virtually no evidence of the freight operation today, and it takes a bit of imagination to figure out where the tracks were. Notice that I didn’t allow a PCC to interfere with the scene: this was about the PFE refers!
On July 1, 1995, a vintage PCC dressed in Boston’s MTA orange passes one of the Boeing-Vertol LRVs on Church Street. I’m probably in the minority, but I always liked the Boeing cars. This photo is a little ironic, because only Boston and San Francisco bought the Boeings.
Over the years, I’ve made hundreds of images of San Francisco Muni’s streetcars. There’s a great of variety of equipment from the famous cable-cars to historic and colorfully painted PCCs and other vintage equipment, plus modern European designed trams. The setting is stunning and the weather can be cosmic with wafts of Pacific fog coming over Twin Peaks.
Here’s a sample of a few favorite Muni images.
Cable cars ascend Nob Hill at sunset.Interior of an F-line PCC exposed in May 2008.Cosmic light: an F-line PCC at the foot of Market Street with dense fog flowing over Twin Peaks. Exposed on Fujichrome using a Canon EOS 3 with 200mm lens, September 2009.Muni tracks at 17th and Church Streets.Wild fires make for great sunrises! Cable car tracks at sunrise with the Trans America Pyramid. No filters, no photoshop. Canon EOS 3 with 100-400mm lens on Fujichrome slide film.California Street Cable Car at Market Street late on weekday evening. May 2008.Breda LRVs on Duboce Street, September 2, 2009.Muni N-line service on the Embarcedero, October 2003.
San Francisco is among the many cities featured in my new book Streetcars of America, co-authored with John Gruber. The book is now available through Amazon and other retailers. John and I wrote this compact 64-page soft-cover volume in 2013. It is priced at under $10.
This is among the modern images featured in the book. It pictures two eras of Italian cars on the streets of San Francisco. The majority of the images in Streetcars of America are vintage photos from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Exposed on Fujichrome slide film with a Canon EOS 3 fitted with a 24mm lens.
San Francisco Muni’s F-Line route operates with a variety of vintage streetcars, including streamlined PCC cars painted in various historic liveries to represent systems that originally operated these cars.
Popular with tourists and residents alike, the vintage cars are fun to ride and photograph. Unlike most modern transit, the F-Line offers continual variety, with different cars operating from day to day.
In May 2008, I made this photograph of PCC 1061 dressed for Pacific Electric in front of the restored Ferry Building on San Francisco’s Embarcedero. Originally built for Philadelphia, this was among the cars acquired for operation in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Some restoration work for out-of-service heritage cars has been done by the Market Street Railway (volunteer support group for Muni’s historic rail lines ); these are turned over to Muni when restoration nears the point where cars are ready for revenue service.
When I was visiting Brussels last weekend, I made a series of nocturnal images of the city and its transport. Below are a few of my favorites.
Brussels Central Station is largely below street level. Access to the platforms is via this modern ground level building. I exposed this image on the evening of March 22, 2013 using my Lumix LX3 set at ISO 80 in ‘A’ (aperture) mode with a +2/3 exposure over-ride (to compensate for the night sky and highlights from streetlights). The final exposure was f2.8 at 1 1/3 seconds.Sometimes it’s best to take an opportunistic approach to urban photography. I made this grab-shot with my Canon EOS 7D (fitted 28-135mm lens set at 5000 ISO) from the front seat of a Citroen Picasso paused at a set of traffic lights. Panning the tram using slow shutter speed minimizes the visual defects caused by shooting through a car window. The combination of twilight, streetlights, and motion make for a surrealistic image.A Brussels PCC tram glides along at dusk on March 24, 2013. Exposed with a Canon EOS 7D fitted with 28-135mm, set at ISO 5000 f3.5 1/30 second.
