Every time I ride the train up and down the I-95 corridor, I’m fascinated by the industrial (and post-industrial) landscape it reveals. Some of that you could approach by car, but much of it you can’t unless you’re authorized to go into various large fenced-off areas where factories, refineries, warehouses, abandoned facilities, and so on are situated.
I’ve tried driving along through light industrial areas in the Mid-Atlantic looking for spots to take photographs, but that often doesn’t work very well—a lot of the access roads don’t have places to pull over, the vantage points aren’t great from streetside, there are high visually-intrusive fences, guards and cops are very wary about someone walking up and down taking landscape pictures, and so on.
From the trains, you’re often up high looking down into interesting places or there are no fences in the way. So I have often experimented with taking shots from the train. I put on a circular polarizer filter—they help with reducing the glare from the windows—and I put the shutter on the fastest speed that produces some kind of light (too fast and all you get is darkness unless it’s blazingly light outside. I’ll try to get the highest aperture but often I’ve got to go fairly wide-open just to get a decent shot.
If the window is too scratchy or dirty, it’s not happening. If it’s too close to night, it’s also not happening. But every once in a while, I get the shot, and it’s one I couldn’t get any other way unless I had permission to be out on the train tracks, walking across train bridges with a camera and tripod. (I sometimes think a bit about the awesome images you’d be able to make if you were the proverbial last person on earth, it’s a sort of Burgess-Meredith-Twilight-Zone-episode-for-photographers thing).
Great photo, Tim. I love the juxtaposition of the plane and the beam hanging from the crane.