In Photoshop is where the fun begins.  First I ran the photo through Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.  It is really the end all and be all for black and white conversions.  I adjusted the photo to my liking getting all the tones, highlights, shadows and the structure adjusted to my liking and the last thing was toned it with the strongest of the Blue toners.  Back in Photoshop I the decided I wanted to punch the blue up even more, so I added a photo filter adjustment layer and set it to the Cooling Blue 82 and adjusted the strength to my liking.  For some unexplained reason though my mind still told me, this just isn’t finished yet, I mean it looked pretty cool but there was still something missing.  So next up Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4!

I hear you now.  This is a black and white image what the hell are you doing Color Efex?  Well honestly I didn’t know what I wanted to do I was just playing around and having fun!  When it launched it defaulted to the last filter that I had used on a previously edited photo it just happened to be Bi-Color Filters.  I though hmm, this looks kinda cool and I started playing with all the color options.  I ended up on the #1 under Violet/Pink.  I again played around with all the settings, Opacity, Blend, Vertical Shift, Rotation, the Highlight and Shadow protection.  When I got something I liked I just clicked Save and was back in Photoshop.

Just a quickie today.  Another photo from the Mayor’s Cup last weekend.  This time a pan as the pack of the Men’s race pushes through turn 2.  A lot of people have been asking me what my setting were for these panning shots so here it goes.  ISO 200 usually on this day as it was overcast.  Shutter speed 1/80th and I adjusted the aperture as needed based on if the sun was out or if it was cloudy but I was generally around f/10.  I tried panning at 1/60th but with the 5D mark II it just was a little too show for the autofocus and FPS of the camera.  If I had a 1D mark IV for the race I would have totally been able to pan it at 1/60th maybe even 1/40th.

How many of you actually put into practice what you learned at a conference or seminar? How many just go but that is where it ends? The old, I just never have the time, blah blah blah. A couple of weeks ago, while out at Photoshop World in Las Vegas, I was fortunate enough to sit in on a couple of Dave Black’s classes. For those that don’t know who Dave is, he is an amazing sports photographer that has truly mastered strobing athletes in competition. From using big pack lights to now using speedlights he has done it all. I listened to him lecture on his theories on lighting. Dave didn’t go into the nitty gritty of settings, numbers and ratios, I mean the classes are only an hour long.

I knew in a few weeks I would be again photographing the TD Mayor’s Cup Criterium road race. Knowing that I sat and listened to Dave’s general approaches to lighting action sports and I attempted to reverse engineer the technical aspects of it with the knowledge of working with speedlights that I have. I had my buddy Chris shooting with me and instead of roaming the course as is usually the case we picked our favorite corner, turn 2, and stayed there. We shot static, we did low to the ground, panning, then I broke out my Canon Speedlites and set up my rig.

Basics I took my two Speedlites and put them on cold shoes on a camera plate that I normally use for my magic arm. Then I mounted that plate to my mono pod with a brass stud. I used Pocket Wizard Plus II’s and Chris held it for a while till we got it just right then we gaffer taped it to the rails behind the hay bails. I mess a bunch with camera settings during the Women’s race trying to get it dialed in. I thought it would be perfect for the Men’s race, but as usual out the in the field a bit of the known unknowns start to happen. The men’s race has like three times as many people in the field, which means when they are in a pack rounding the corner the outside guys are a LOT closer to the flashes then in the woman’s race, so more on the fly adjusting of both camera and lights were needed. Thankfully the lights were only about 25 feet away because I was in manual flash mode and needed to go adjust them myself.

It wasn’t a total success but it was by no means a failure. I got some good photos, my keeper ratio wasn’t as high as normal, but I don’t care because I got out of my comfort zone and tried introducing something new into my work. The more and more I work at it the better it will get and that is what you should be doing with the knowledge you learn. Mistakes come with the territory and you can’t get better if you don’t make mistakes.

So ever since uploading my shots from the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series here in Boston I have had some people asking me what exactly my technique was for doing my sequence photos of the divers was. So here we are a little blog post about my steps in creating the photo you see above.

It is actually a pretty straight forward process and if you plan it correctly you can create the final image rather quickly. For these photos I used a Canon 30D with a Canon EF 24-70 f/2.8L lens. The other must have ingredient is a tripod, with out one I wouldn’t even try to attempt this. You want to capture the athlete, in this case the diver, in mid flight while the environment stays perfectly still.

Place you camera on high speed shutter. Pre focus your shot and after switch your lens to manual focus so it doesn’t inadvertently start searching during the shots. Now as the diver starts his jump press and hold the shutter button or cable release if you have one and capture his sequence through the air. I was using an older 30D and the RAW frame buffer is only 9 shots so in order for me to get the whole jump from platform to water I had to change from RAW to large jpg. Next up is computer time.

Import your photos into your program of choice, in the case of me writing this it will be Lightroom and I will explain the steps from a Lightroom to Photoshop workflow. After importing into Lightroom take care of any keywording that you wish, it is not at all necessary to do any work in the develop model at this point.

Select the shots you wish to use in the sequence. Not all are required. You may have some instances where there are two or more photos where the person is too close and overlapping. But if you are not sure just select them all and you can take care of it later in Photoshop.

After you have them selected right click over the selection, choose Edit In, and then choose Load As Layers in Photoshop. This will open up all the photos in photoshop and stack them on top of one another as layers.

Now add a black layer mask to all the layers except the bottom most layer, do this by holding down OPT/ALT while click the layer mask button at the bottom of the layers list. This adds a mask that hides everything.

Now one layer at a time do the following. Click on the most bottom layer with a mask. With the mask selected hit CMD or CNRL if you are on a PC and I to invert the layer mask to white. This will show all on the the layer. With a black brush paint over the athlete, which masks him out on the layer hiding him. Once you have masked him out completely with the layer mask still selected hit CMD+I again to invert the mask back to what it was. Now you have only the athlete showing through onto the layer below. Repeat this process all the way up the layer stack till you get to the last one and you are done!

Now you can save and close the file in photoshop and it will automatically bring it back into Lightroom as a PSD file and you can develop it to the style you want. In my case of the divers, while I was still in Photoshop I added Tonal Contrast filter with Nik Color Efex Pro. Then back in Lightroom I tweaked it as I needed to get the final photo sequence.

Click on the thumbnails below for a larger view of the graphics.

There has been a lot of chatter lately out there on the interwebs about shooting the Milky Way, timelapse and long exposure star photography. It got me looking back through my shoot in the White Mountains last fall where I came across this shot that I never published…till now. I actually had processed the photo, but after looking at it, I didn’t like it so I decided to give it another go. First thing that had to change was my white balance setting, it was way too warm of an image. I started playing with the WB presets in Lightroom, but after a minute I just said screw it and started playing with the sliders and found a temperature of 2300K worked perfectly for what I wanted the photo to look like.

The next step was to make all the stars pop, get the duller ones brighter and not over brighten the already bright ones. I was playing with tone curves like there was no tomorrow, but nothing was working. Then by accident I tried something that worked really well. I set the tone curve in LR to point and started with a linear curve. Then instead of doing the traditional S-Curve I grabbed the top point and just dragged it straight across to the left about 1/3 of the way. I boosted the blacks, clarity and vibrance a bit, did some real minor noise reduction and that was it.

I’ve been doing a bunch of random writing lately, which has been good, it has let me descramble things in this dyslexic  brain of mine.  Most of it is in many pieces and well random.  Some things I am writing as articles for my buddy Andy for his new site Unknown Photographer.  Here is my first of the randomness that has been filtered out.

As the great James Brown says, “I got soul, and I’m superbad”  The question is, do your photos?  A year or so ago I was featured as Photographer of the Week for Boston.com the online edition of the Boston Globe paper.  The first person to leave a comment was my friend Korri, who herself was featured the week prior, and she said something that a year later still sits with me, she said “loved hearing about your process and the journey you’re (still) on with your art – that’s why your photos are so good – because YOU are in them and care about them.”

That thought is always in the back of my mind.  I hope that is a reason that people like my photos whether they have ever met me or not, because they have my soul in them.

I like to think that the reason that I love photos from other photographers is because it has their soul in them.  We are in a world today of over politeness, anyone and everyone can own a camera and call themselves a photographer.  All those same people can also set up an account with flickr or one of the other countless online photo communities out there.  Then when they post, friends, family, really anyone and everyone can and will post comments like, “great photo”, “love it”, “This is fantastic, you captured the…”.

Don’t pay attention too much to those comments.  I don’t.  Friends and family are never going to tell you your work sucks, they just aren’t.  Neither are your other “flickr friends”, people only post positive things, they are afraid to post something in public that may seem negative, even though it may be constructive in nature.

If you pay too much attention to all these “positive” comments you chance developing a false sense of security about your work.  Is it really good?  Or, is it just average?  A photo can be technically correct but that doesn’t make it good.  What makes a photo good is if you put yourself into it.

Google+ is becoming a great avenue for you to post pictures and ask for some honest feedback from real working pros.  Us photographers have taken very quickly to the G+ and are joining what seems exponentially every day.

Most importantly how does the picture feel to you?  Does it strike a cord, evoke some sort of personal emotion?  Does it bring back long forgotten memories?  Start asking yourself these types of questions and if you start answering yes to them then you know you are on the right track to creating great photography.  Remember the art in photography is totally subjective, not everyone is going to like it, but if they are talking about it, well then, thats the purpose of art isn’t it?

Congrats to my friends Joe and Hilary who got married yesterday (Sunday).  Also don’t forget that this week is the National Poetry Slams in Cambridge MA.

It’s that time!  My annual post about getting killer fireworks photos.  This pretty much the exact same post as last year, but with updated photos from my shoot last year.  I’ll say that I followed my own advice and it paid off we had a great time and we all got some great photos at the end of the night.

1. Location, Location, Location.

I can not stress enough the importance of finding a good location.  Not only one that is going to give you the best vantage point but one that is going to provide you with ample space in crowds of people.  If you have the ability to do so, do a little recon on some places you might like to set up.  Don’t just recon during the day either.  Fireworks shows are at night.  It is important to see what your environment’s ambient conditions are.  Annoying things like street lights are not on during the day, so while it might seem like a great place to set up with the perfect view, what happens when you get there and there is a bunch of ambient light spilling into your lens and screwing up your exposure.

Have a back up location, or better yet several backup locations, this is a lead in to my next tip.

2. Get there early

I can not speak for you or where you live, but in Boston, I rank the 4th of July show as the tops in the US.  Not only do we have the fireworks but we have the Boston Pops live from the Hatch Shell.  It’s nationally televised event and it draws a crowd in the millions to the banks of the Charles River.  There are typically five or six of us that hang out watch the fireworks and take photos, and our arrival time depends on the location we have chosen for the year.  My recon usually starts the month before for a new spot with the previous year as a back up plan.  For this years location we plan on starting our arrival at noon, yes you read that right noon.  That’s ten and a half hours of sitting around!  Last years location required of an arrival time of about 6pm.  I could see this years position from it and it was already packed.  If you think noon is early, people that are going to the Hatch Shell for the Pops concert which starts at 10pm will start arriving at 6am to get the best spot for not only the concert but viewing the fireworks.

If you are going with a group of people send someone to each location that you have scouted out.  That way if another group of people got the drop on you and got to your primary location before you could get there, you aren’t spending loads of time getting the whole group to location B, which by the time you get there may also already have people in it.  Also even if there aren’t people there, what happens if on the day of the 4th they put  up a t.v. viewing stand, speaker tower, or broadcast camera position.  You will already have someone at your backup spot who can start to unpack spread out and wait for the rest of you to get there.

3. Be prepared for the long haul

As I already mentioned, this year the plan for my group as of now is to start arriving around noon to secure the spot.  Once you get there, set your tripods up right away, leave a couple of feet in between them so you have room to adjust things.  It may seem selfish to others, but you are there for a reason, and you know what you got there before them so if they are lippy with you because you took “their” spot, tough luck you got to the location first!  It may sound a bit grade school, finders keeps type stuff, but sometimes that is all that people understand.

Bring a collapsible chair, a popular one is one of those fabric ones that can fold up into a bag and can be slung over your shoulder.  You can pick them up virtually anywhere, I have seen them in Bed, Bath and Beyond, CVS, Rite Aid, even grocery stores.  They are like $15-$20 and worth every penny.  Set them up in a semi circle behind your tripods, not only does this increase your real estate for the day, but think of it like being around a campfire.  Except instead of a fire you now have a place to put all your gear where everyone can keep an eye on it.  Nothing could be worse than being the person on the end of your group, you turn around to talk the person next to you, the next thing you know someone has walked off with your gear bag cause you weren’t paying attention.  Again people may look at you in disgust because of the amount of room you have taken up, but you are the people with potentially multiple thousands of dollars of camera equipment with you.  I know everyone reading this has been smart enough to insure their stuff right!! But you really don’t want to have to file a claim.

Think of spending the day together like a barbecue, everyone brings something.  A cooler with ice, water and soda, snacks sandwiches.  If the spot you are going to allows grilling, bring a small propane grill, hot dogs and hamburgers.  If they don’t pick up some subs.  Don’t forget the napkins!

Be aware of the bathroom situation.  If you are out on location in an area like a city, it’s most likely going to be porta potties!  A bit more rural?  You may have to find a spot in the woods so bring some T.P.!  Don’t all go at once either, a couple of you will need to stay behind and man base camp, some one has to watch the gear.

Don’t forget the small stuff.  Watch the weather.  Whats the temperature going to be, the high and the low.  Are you gonna be inland or on the water where there is an ocean breeze?  Pack a jacket, some long pants or a sweat shirt.  I have hiking pants that have zip off legs, which are perfect, the lower legs can be folded up and put into the cargo pockets, it also means you don’t have to pack pants.  Got your sunscreen?  Bug spray? Sunglasses?  Book to read?  ipod?  You get the idea.  At the end of this wicked long post I will include a general pack list.  Lastly have fun with your friends, the top of a flat cooler can make for a good place to play poker, setup a chess board, play dominos, point is have fun with the day, relax and forget about work and life.

Showtime!  If you are still with me, now its time for those all important tips on getting the shot.

1. Stabilize that bad boy

Unless you want to shoot at ISO 6400 a tripod or some other means of stabilization is a must.  Another cool option is a magic arm, some super clamps work great too.  You could use a Gorilla Pod as an inexpensive option, although the top of the line Gorilla Pod that will support a big DSLR is just as much money as a cheap tripod.

Now that you have your camera on your tripod, another must have is a cable release, these can range from $30-40 into the hundreds.  If you don’t have one, you could set the self timer on the camera, what ever you do you don’t want any camera shake.  Remember if you set your self timer you have to wait for the shutter to fire you might miss something.  Most DSLR cameras that I know of have a 2 second and a 10 second setting.  At a minimum make sure you use the 2 second timer.

An added level of stabilization is to use the mirror lock feature.  When turning this on, you will hit the button on your cable release, the mirror will go up, then you have to press the cable release a second time and the shutter will open to take the picture.  This reduces internal shake as the mirror moving is enough to shake the sensor.

2. The basics

Camera, check.  Charged batteries check.  Camera on tripod with shutter release and mirror lock up triple check!  Time to zero out your camera.  Make sure you have your ISO set to its native setting.  That would be ISO 100 on a Canon, and ISO 200 on a Nikon.  Make sure your camera is NOT set to P for “professional” and set it to manual, I know scary right we are going to shoot on manual!  There are probably dozens of setting combinations that you could use, but fireworks shows are only about 30 minutes long, not that long for experimenting or you are going to miss shots.

You have your ISO set to 100 (or 200), its time to set your shutter speed and aperture.  I have found that a shutter speed of 4 seconds and an f stop of either f/11 or f/14 work best.  Turn on your auto focus on for the first burst and as soon as your camera locks focus, turn auto focus off that way your camera isn’t stuck searching for focus.  Using these setting should all but guarantee you will get some killer photos.

3. Get creative

Now that you have your camera set, have a few shots under your belt that you love and are feeling comfortable mix it up a bit.  If you are shooting wide angle, switch it up and try some telephoto, or slap on that fisheye lens and go REALLY wide.

You could also put an ND filter on your lens for really long exposure work and try to capture lots of fireworks in the air.  This however is a delicate balancing act.  Too long of an exposure and you are going to have a lot of blown out highlights.

Got multiple cameras?  Put a wide angle on one of them and a telephoto on the other so you don’t have to waste time changing lenses.  Cool, but I hear you, how do I support both, I don’t have two tripods.  Remember about 15 chapters ago when I mentioned magic arms, super clamps and Gorilla Pods?  Put the other camera on one of those.  I shoot with two cameras, I have usually put my 24-70 on one and I put my fisheye on the other.  That way I can be shooting ultra wide all night, and experiment with my other camera with zooming and ND filters. The camera with my 24-70 goes on my tripod and my camera with the fisheye goes on the magic arm.  The magic arm for those who don’t know is an awesome accessory, it is a multi jointed arm that can articulate in any direction and be locked into place.  I usually super clamp it to a tripod leg, doing this lets me hang my camera over a railing so that I don’t get it in the shot when the fisheye is on.

So lets flash back to last Wednesday.  It was Day 1 of Photoshop World in Orlando, the exhibit hall had just opened and I was wandering around the booths checking things out.  As I am making my way down one of the middle aisles I came across a booth.  In this particular booth stood two guys by the names of Paul and Rob.  Paul runs LensProtogo the lens rental shop from Concord MA that I rent all of my glass from when I need some extra reach or something that tilts and shifts.  These guys are great, and with the amount Paul and I have emailed and talked on the phone with one another this was the first time we got to shake hands and meet face to face.  We were talking shop for a bit I was checking out the glass and there on the tripod was a Canon 7D mounted to a Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L the biggest and baddest production lens Canon makes.  I thought nothing of it other then wow and we shook hands again, I went on my way and they went on to talking to more people.

Flash forward a couple of hours and I was in the Westcott booth shooting the models and watching Erik Valind give his talk about establishing re-pore with the model again thinking nothing out of the ordinary.  But later that evening after attending the After Hours Party with my roommates Erik and Krysten and chatting with Hope the model featured here, the creative wheels started spinning and at about 3am I had it!  I looked up from my laptop which was in mid download of the days images and I said “Erik tomorrow I wanna shoot Hope with an 800mm lens!”  Which got a hell yeah response from the other two members of team awesome.  The next afternoon I popped over to the LensProtogo booth said “Paul I wanna borrow the 800 in a little bit to take some portraits.” I got another go for it and later that afternoon I grabbed the lens and slapped my 5D mark II on it and hit the exhibit floor.

Well first thing, when you are walking around a trade show floor full of photographers with an 800mm lens people are going to notice!  I had more photos and video taken of me and more people asked me about the lens, if it was mine, I was spinning in circles.  After a bit Erik started teaching he started his class by grabbing my camera to say that, he is not in fact Joe McNally and he needed to compensate with something.  Funny but at the same time he was trying to demonstrate a point about comfortability with models and the nerves that some can have by either being way too close into personal space or at the opposite end having a giant cannon of a lens be pointed at them.  But we let Hope in on what we were going to do and after Erik was about 15 minutes into his talk I walked about 30 feet from Hope into my position (min focus distance for the 800 is 25 feet!).  I grabbed Krysten, positioned her in front of me and used her shoulder as my monopod!  I delivered instructions to her about stand straight, bend a little, left, right, etc and Erik relayed my instructions to Hope as to her body position, eye direction and so on.  At 800mm and only 30 feet away with the amount of compression on this lens it really is a head shot!  It was a great team effort, and it really goes to show how good collaboration and communication even on a spur of the moment idea is critical in getting the shot.  Oh and that lens rules!  It was like parting the red sea, as soon as people saw me shooting with it the did acrobatics to get out of the way and yet more pictures of me taking pictures.  Thank you Paul and LensProtogo for letting me borrow that bad boy for a couple of hours to create some great pictures, it may not be an everyday portrait lens, but it does one hell of a job!

You’re bags are packed, you’re ready to go, and you are leaving on a jet plane…ok now that, that is out of the way, you’re getting ready to spend three or four days in O-town with some of the coolest photography and design nerds and geeks (myself included) in the industry.  Maybe this is your first time, maybe you have been once before but you were too shy, didn’t break out of your shell to get the full experience of laughing and having fun with people who you are now proud to call your friends.  This is much more then an industry event and education week, in fact if you have been going long enough, these people do become some of your closest friends.  You start out seeing each other at either the east coast or west coast event, start emailing talking on the phone, then you start hitting both PSW’s every year with them, before you know it you are taking vacations with them!  So here are some tips for surviving a week of Photoshop World and get the most out of it, these are in no particular order and are not limited to 10 like some lists.

1. Make friends with people!  It may sound easy but for some people it can be hard so here are a few helpful tips.  If you are using twitter, start following the #PSW hashtag, talk to people.  Go to the tweetup party on Tuesday night at the Rosen Center Hotel pool.  If you are sitting next to someone in class, standing next to someone on an escalator, or while listening to someone give a demo on the expo floor, just say hi and introduce yourself.  Get your ticket to the After Party, go to midnight madness and if all else fails, the first person you should make friends with….VANELLI!!! Everything else will fall into place and you will find yourself in places you never expected.
2. Bring snacks and water with you, you never know when you will be able to eat.  Unlike the Vegas PSW the conference center in Orlando isn’t directly connected to the hotel it is across the street, so bring a daily survival kit.  In addition to snacks and water, aspirin, chapstick, tissues, all purpose wet wipes, hand sanitizer.  Basics that will make you not have to haul back to your room for something.
3. Comfortable clothing and footwear, sure we will be in Florida (or Vegas for that matter) it will be hot outside, but conference centers are notorious for being freezers, an extra layer never hurt.
4. Go to the Art of Digital Photography, even if you aren’t a photographer, it is one of the most inspiring events at the conference.
5. If you are a designer and not a photographer, attend any class taught by Bert Monroy, Corey Barker and Terry White, they are the greatest and if you wanna learn 3D in Photoshop, Corey is the man.  Also if you are a designer and have no interest in photography, go to the photography classes as well, just because a class is on Portrait Retouching doesn’t mean you wont learn any really cool Photoshop tricks…trust me you will.
6. If you are a photographer, while on the exhibit floor, make sure you stop at the Westcott booths!  In Vegas last fall they set up four really cool shooting booths with their spider lights, every day they had four completely different sets and models for people to photograph, it was cool and I have been told they plan on it being even cooler this year.
7. If you are going by yourself, get your red button for, Dinner with a Stranger, it is another cool way to meet some new people.
8. Go to the closing ceremonies.  While you maybe temped after your last class to just go back to your room and crash, head to the closing event.  There are a ton of give aways, maybe there is someone you met early in the week that you didn’t have a chance to catch up with, find them, give them your business card, bump iPhone’s to exchange contact info, whatever.  Also maybe you will see yourself on the highlight reel in stills or video, it may seem like a huge conference…but there are cameras EVERYWHERE!
9. Have an iPhone or an iPad? Download download the official PSW app from Shawn Welsh, it is a killer app with tons of stuff packed into it, most importantly you can use it to create your class schedule, and it will be updated live throughout the conference.  It also has the Bump app built into it so exchanging info is a breeze.
10. Leave to workbook in your room.  It is big and heavy, just follow along, if you have your head in the book you will most likely miss something, just bring something to jot down notes.  99% of what the instructors are teaching is in the book and they will let you know if it isn’t.
11. Be on the lookout for great deals on the show floor, the guys at Midwest Photo Exchange never disappoint by providing some of the best discounts on stuff I have ever seen and they are a great group of people too.
12. Coffee, Red Bull (RC’s favorite), 5 hour energy, these drinks are your friends.  Sleep is sometimes little to none, especially with all the networking/socializing/partying going on.  There is plenty of time for sleep after the conference is over.

That’s my list.  It may only number 12 but there is a lot more then 12 things in there, and I know I have forgotten some, just remember to have fun, I mean come on it is photography and Photoshop, we make money getting to take pictures and play with a really expensive digital set of crayons!  When you run into Vanelli and trust me you will, call him sandbag…he will know what it means!

Lastly if you can’t make it to Orlando for Photoshop World, well shame on you!  But seriously if you can’t make it, myself and my good friend Krysten Marlette will be live blogging the Keynote Address with the one and only NAPP ninja Nancy Masse! it should be barrel of laughs!!

…to your everyday world.  I know I’ve mentioned it at times in the past, but I have been hearing a lot from shooters lately how they are uninspired, or the weather isn’t cooperating.  It’s too cold, it gets dark too quickly. WHAAAA.  Instead stop your crying and get out there shooting.  Look at the things you see every day and try to envision them completely different.  As you have all been noticing, I have had an ongoing theme on my blog and flickr lately of photos from the subway.  It’s not because I love the subway, fact is these days almost everyone on the MBTA wants to destroy the system for its constant failures, but that is a different story all together.  Rather it is my daily commute.  I get to the station at the same time every day, take the same trains, hell I even recognize 70% of the people on the train every morning.  It is these situations that can get you complacent.

Rather then succumbing to that complacency look at those environments with some fresh eyes.  Snap photos of the everyday objects, take a look around at the details.  Are there things that you have overlooked before?  Perhaps there is a sign or a railing or decaying stairs you havent really noticed because it is in your periphery, just blending into the background.  Go over to those things.  First look at them on their own do they seem interesting?  How do they look in their immediate surroundings?  How about in a more global way?  Once you start asking yourself these questions you will start to finally open your eyes. And guess what?  To do this, you dont need any gear!  You can simply just walk over to something and look at it.  Take a “mental” picture…I know mind blowing idea isn’t.  If you absolutely need to, snap a iPhone pic to later reference.

This is a view I see every morning.  Above I talked about going over and looking at an every day object.  In this case, it is a little dangerous to try to jump the tracks to go look at the dual stairs in the photo.  Instead every morning I watch the people moving in and out of this micro environment.  They can be on this mid platform, the far one on the other side of the train that is sitting there or even on the train.  And if I see an interesting looking person, pose, or interaction I make a picture.  There have been some photos of late when I take a peak on the LCD I say to my self, eh, it average, but then when I get it imported, I see some really interesting things happening within the frame.

The above is another prime example.  I took this standing in the stairwell of a Green Line trolley through the window in the closed door into the trolley on the opposite platform.  I mean really how many times do you sit on a subway staring out the window into the darkness of the tunnel just counting the minutes till you can get home after a long day at the office.  In fact the photo at the top of the post was taken from the exact same spot as this as the train pulled through Copley Square on its way to Hynes.  Your photos don’t always have to be litteral or contain people.  The abstract can make for equally powerful photographs.  While I have given you visual examples here from my eyes, that of an urban lifestyle photographer, fact is the text is very generic and can be applied to any type of photographic genre.  The biggest points here are don’t worry about all the gear, or if you should take it as an HDR, or how it would look in Silver Efex Pro.  Just go shoot pictures.  Keep your vision simple, and your photos will stay simple.  Simple can be very powerful.