A new blog series!
In photography it’s very rare that the shot you end up using is the first shot you took. A good photo kind of grows organically in the moment and many times that growth is captured as well. But you never get to see that evolution, us photographers just show you the best one and rarely reveal the 30 other shots we took before settling on that one. Photo Evolution is a how-to blog series where I go back to some of my most recognizable photographs and reveal evolution process by showing you the shots that led up to me getting the one I really wanted.
For this first post, I’m going to show one of my favorite shots, “Boston Red Line at Downtown Crossing”
Final Shot
Now getting this photo was really just a study in patience and luck. About 3 trains before this one there was a female conductor who looked really interesting and I barely was able to snap a decent, but ultimately uninteresting shot of her.
And just like that, the train was gone and I thought I had missed it completely. But I decided to stick around, and a few trains later my guy showed up. And he was far more interesting than the first conductor that I was originally so excited about. As soon as he pulled up I started shooting, determined not to miss getting a really great shot of this guy. I wanted it to not just show him, but more of the train and somehow capture the conductors total lack of interaction with the passengers.
Here are the shots leading up to the final shot. It starts with the shot of the female conductor and then ends with my final image.
Final Shot
Sometimes in photography there’s not anything you can really do to force the shot you want, you just have to let it grow in front of you, and be ready for it when it does. In this instance, as you can see in the gallery…I was actually completely satisfied with my shot of just the conductor looking out of his window with no one else around. I could have said that I had it and left, but thankfully I waited. Because as soon as I got what I thought was my shot, here came this lady running to make the train…and I sat and waited for her to pass and snapped the shot (well two actually…you’ll notice I missed her the first time).
So there ya go…Photo Evolution #1. A little bumbly, I know, but hopefully interesting 
. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to leave them in the comments below. I read everyone of them and promise to answer as best I can. Also, if you there are any of my photos that you’d like to see shown in this series, please let me know!
Thank you for this post. As a very amateur photographer, it is discouraging to see final shots from talented people such as yourself and wonder why I am never able to capture something like your final.
I think this is a very interesting angle of posts with commentary.
Thanks, Chad.
awesome to hear man, everybody has to start somewhere! It honestly just takes a TON of shooting to figure out your style, and the main purpose of this series is to kind of help show my process in picking the final image…which honestly comes from YEARS of screwing up