8.02 pm at the perpetually busy Delhi Railway Station in India. I was part of a small tour/photo workshop group awaiting our train to Jodhpur when I observed the scene on the adjacent platform. A train pulling in on the far platform whilst people were moving about on the nearer, platform number 2.
It struck me that this may be a good opportunity to get a photograph and try to capture the scene in an interesting way. I liked the movement of the people and wanted to record them as a blur as they went about their individual travels. The idea that the station has been there for years but the people are part of an endless but restless, transient mass appealed to me. A slow shutter speed was required to get the effect I wanted, I set the camera to 1/5 second and steadied it on a stairwell railing to control or eliminate camera movement as much as possible.
I took several frames but decided to process this particular one. The key for me is the woman in the blue and yellow sari in the middle of the frame. The shutter speed is slow enough to render the faster moving people, or those moving across the frame, as blurs, but some people, critically in this case the woman in the sari, relatively sharp.
The image was cropped down to a panoramic format as there was nothing of interest across the top and bottom of the full frame anyway. It was shortly after this that I managed to get lost in the crowd and almost missed my train! Now there’s a story for another time….. 🙂 ~KD
