Link to slide show: An Afternoon commute.

 

If you have a slow Internet connection, don't even bother. Otherwise, I suggest you find a time when you have a relaxed 23 minutes to spare (nothing good on TV ;), maximize your browser by pressing F11, then click on the link above, switch to slide show mode and let it do it's thing. (If it balks from time to time it will most likely resume as soon as it downloads more data, but if not just click on the rectangle on the left of the bottom control set.)

Yes, I know: it's insanely long. I certainly won't blame you if you give it a miss. ;)

Recently, a long-standing e-mail friend and fellow photog in Europe expressed the desire to have some visual context for my part of the planet: what I see every day, as opposed to what I choose to show through the very selective filter of an artist's eye. I got the beginnings of an idea how to respond later that same day, standing on the platform waiting for the afternoon commuter train. Since I always have my handy Olympus E-P1 with me, I whipped it out just as the train pulled in and went trigger-happy for the next hour. I took 317 shots in that time, pointing the camera out a south-facing window toward Lake Ontario: not quite a human intervalometer but snapping at whatever I could get a read on quickly enough as the scenery sped by. Of the resulting 317 shots, I used 275, discarding only total misfires plus several near duplicates. So – drastically differing from my usual practice – the shots included are vetted neither for technical nor aesthetic merit, but instead attempt to stand as an honest visual record of one hour of time. The intent is to give as much a sense of you-were-there as possible, window reflections and all. Slide-show verité, if you will.

An interesting exercise is to type in "union station toronto canada" in Google Maps or Google Earth, switch to satellite view, zoom in until you can see the actual rail tracks, then follow along eastward from station to station: Union to Danforth to Scarborough to Eglinton to Guildwood to Rouge Hill to Pickering. If you literally stay on track you'll see the little blue train station icons along the way.

What you're seeing, if you do slog through the slide show, is the north shore of Lake Ontario from Toronto's downtown Union Station to the Pickering ex-urb stop – about 40 kilometers – followed by the three kilometer car trip to my front door. (Notice: no snow in mid November. No, folks, that's not a fluke; Eskimo country is a bit further north. ;)

Although I'm recording what I see every day, looking at it this way gives me a new and unexpected perspective. Yes: there is a lot of construction going on as a third rail line is being added. Yes: the first ten minutes are unabashed big city desolation. But over-all what jumps out for me is not so much how poorly, but how well, nature and humanity co-exist. A thousand years ago the entire area would have been forested; now it's about a 50/50 mix of woodland and human – but it's not Mordor. (Or should that be 45/45/10 mix woodland, human, and graffiti?) I, personally, no longer see forest as being any kind of Eden. To my eye, the temperate-zone forest is the brutal Tyranny of the Tree, creating a very narrow and brittlely homogeneous ecosystem (very different from the incredible variegation of a tropical rain forest) with precious little fodder or shelter for ground animals. I'm not at all sure we haven't done better than nature in at least one regard in this part of the world – by providing some breathing room for a broader mix of flora to flourish. (Another eco-friendly note: the addition of the third rail is entirely due to the popularity of the commuter train system over private vehicles.)

Technical details: I used the Olympus E-P1 with 14-42 zoom lens set to f/8, 800 ISO, and Av + eval meter, adjusting compensation and re-focusing whenever I had a chance (which was seldom). The eval meter, like all its ilk, did a less than stellar job even with my occasional fiddling; I probably should have stuck with manual mode, as per usual. For post-processing I stupidly chose Lightroom beta 3 instead of a production version then had to live with bugs and pokiness. Thanks to the eval meter, not Lightroom, I had to tediously adjust the exposure for each shot, but only a few were wildly off. Focus was rarely a problem given the DOF; and the 800 ISO kept the shutter speed up around 1/1000th to 1/4000th, so few shots are seriously blurred, even when the train hit full speed between outlying stations. Another major issue was camera levelness (unless I consciously think about it I tend to hold the E-P1 level by it's slanting top plate). In all, I plodded through three complete editing passes, each several hours long, to correct for all these problems. The only concessions I made to sugar-coating were a slightly warmer than realistic white balance and exaggerated contrast, as if I had shot slide film and used a warming filter.

One thing that may be puzzling is the shots at the end taken from within a car. In places where I had the road to myself (no cars ahead or behind me for a 100 meters or so), I simply slowed down to a crawl took a grab shot with one hand, then resumed travel. In traffic, as in Fig. 5, I only shot when stopped at a red light.