For want of a little traveling music

Today I ventured, by train, down to Jersey to help Pang drive up his father's station wagon. We decided it will probably prove to be invaluable during our upcoming move. I arrived at the Westport train station only to discover that I'd forgotten to bring the headphones for my Zen Micro.

With nothing to read, I found myself sitting in the doorway of the train taking pictures of nothing to pass the time. Between the photography and the compulsive email-checking I must have looked pretty bored.


For a while during the trip I slapped on my magnifying filter and started shooting some macro shots. The thing about this filter that I love isn't its ability to move the camera closer to the subject - frankly, when it comes to this there really is no substitute for a macro lens. Rather, what I really like about shooting with the magnifying filter is the way it softly blurs anything that isn't dead-center in the frame.


This shot is of the writing etched into windows panels of the train's sliding doors. I took quite a few shots pointing at this text from odd angles - trying to meter the shot turned out to be tricky because the backdrop kept changing. In this particular moment you can see a smoke stack in the center of the image, however it is so blurred it might has well be a matchstick pressed against the other side of the glass.

As for the text itself, I've decided I don't really care about it at all.