By Mitchell Stover

When I was assigned to do a Photo Essay last week in class I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. Originally I was thinking on getting my friends to make a snow man with the snow that came on Saturday however, none of them seemed all that interested in building one. After being stumped my friends and I went out to celebrate a birthday and on the way we took the metro.

Granted, this is not the most original idea however, the metro (at least to me) is something that is new and interesting. The theme for this photo essay is transportation and I chose this theme because depending on where you are in the world transportation means many different things. In certain areas of the world walking and riding bicycles are the main modes of transportation and in other areas public buses and subways are the biggest mode of transportation. For instance I am from Harrisburg Pennsylvania and in my area when you say transportation people don’t think about buses or metro’s we only think about cars because there is extremely limited transportation. This is why the theme and word transportation is interesting to me because depending on where you are from the word never changes but can mean multiple things.

To create this photo essay I stood at the very end of the metro platform and took pictures of the train as it was coming it. I decided to use optical zoom in order to get a close up and pan back as the train was coming in. However, midway through the train coming in I realized that it wasn’t going to work because the poor lighting made it hard for my camera without manual focus to focus. So I began to zoom the whole way back out and took pictures again until the train came to a complete stop. After wards I went back and edited out blurry and poor pictures and imported the final ten into photoshop. I then proceeded to create a canvas that was 9600 by 2160 so that it could fit the ten 1920 by 1080 photos on it in two rows of five. Then I simply copy and pasted the images on and put them in the correct order and then removed the color, which gives you what you see above.

What I like about the photo essay is that especially in the last two photos there are people in them but their faces are blurred which gives you the sense that people are there but they are mysterious and it gives you a sense that the train is actually moving. What I don’t like though is the fact that I zoomed in with the camera. I think it actually ruined the shot because while it does look like the train is getting closer it isn’t till its really close in the photo that you can really tell it is moving. The last thing that I would do again if I had the opportunity is to try to play with the camera settings to get the pictures to be brighter and maybe a bit more blurred to give you the sensation that it is moving towards you.