Title: From the Train #5, from the series Somewhere between New Haven, CT and New York City 2010
Photographer: Don Hudson. View more of his work here: Flickr.
Statement: “When we visited our daughter and her husband in Connecticut recently, we took the train into New York City from New Haven. It was a beautiful bright winter’s day, and so taking a cue from my friend Manfred Hoffman and his work from trains, I decide I would use the light conditions and time to work on a couple of things.”
“One, I have started to think of my little Sigma DP2 as a black and white camera of late, so I took this opportunity to work on that. I set it at ISO 400, put it on manual focus and pre-set the focus. This way there is virtually no “shutter lag”. In the last century I shot predominately in black and white, but in the last five years it’s been the other way around. I’m interested in re-exercising my monochrome seeing muscles.
The other thing I wanted to do was step outside my way of working box. In recent years I have become a very deliberate and slow worker. Often I use a tripod, even in daylight with high shutter speeds, in order to carefully consider my framing. What I was looking to do with this shooting from the moving train thing, was to simply react to what passed by, again hopefully exercising some intuitive visualization muscles in the process. The added bonus for me was the anticipation of finding out later what my intuitive eyeball and camera “saw”.
Out of the 85, or so, images made in the approximately 1 1/2 hour trip I selected six that attracted me. So, what do you think? Interesting? Boring? Shut up Don and go back to your deliberate color stuff? Any semi-lucid remarks are welcomed and encouraged.”
