Awareness of the outside world. Daily Mail: AI-powered traffic lights that hold drivers on red for up to 20 seconds longer to delay their arrival in air pollution hotspots will be trialled in Britain this year, Pinkstone, 2020.
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Highway 280
Inverness (Birmingham) AL, USA
October 2023
Technical Details
Traffic lights. f/13.0, 1/640 sec., 66.0 mm, ISO 400. Manual & auto-focus.
Post production. Resize, border, and watermark.
What I Learned
It’s all well & good to take pictures of pretty things. Even if the photographic technique is average, the subject is still pretty. How to get interesting shots from the less scenic parts of life? Not gory events. They have their own drama. How to enliven the mundane?
I started with traffic. Perhaps a photographer would be assigned to cover a story on local road conditions. Or contracted to create visuals for a DOT annual report. Or as a personal challenge to take a compelling photo.
I ended up with more question than answers.
Access. City streets. Easy. Stand on the corner. For me, too far away. Ex-urbes are closer but less activity or street furniture. The best option for me was a large suburban intersection of two divided roads with multiple lanes. These are NOT places for pedestrians. No crosswalks. No crossing lights. No one expecting a person on foot.
In this case, I used Google Earth to find a parking lot with a close, clear view of an intersection. There was a better, i.e. more interesting, intersection further down but no way to approach safely.
Official assistance would not help here. Let’s say you are doing that DOT assignment. Any attempt to give the photographer protected space – a parked truck, cones – would affect traffic flow, and change the thing being photographed.
Equipment. Wide angle to get the whole picture but also zoom to get close. I will assume that a lens that can do both is trop cher. A remote-activated camera? Drone?
Time of day. Depends on the point being made. Empty – or as empty as it gets – in the wee small hours? The crowds at rush hour? Rivers of lights at night?
Shutter speed. How to convey flow? If you stop the action, it looks like a traffic jam.
Anonymity. How to achieve? Is it desirable? If the objective is traffic in general rather than a specific location, it makes sense to limit the lettering. Obviously, locations can be identified by other means, but road signs in the photograph would draw the eye.
For a first attempt, I went with metonymy.
Previous [Son of the Return To Beeswax Creek, Photography]
Onwards!
Katherine
Virtual Brush Box 