The concept
Shooting Anna in the subway was all about motion blur at first. The goal was to recreate some images I loved from different photographers on Instagram, where the subway train blurs behind the subject simply because of its speed.
How it worked
It took some tweaking of my settings to land on a shutter speed that worked best. Ultimately it was 1/30th of a second that I found looked best. Or at least, gave me the results I had intended. However, like most of my projects recently, once we had achieved what we set out to do, it was then time to experiment with different ideas.
Subway stations have grit and character
Some of the subway stations we visited that day have such interesting character to them. I loved the black walls at Union. I loved the red and blue lights and the way they gleamed off of the tiles at St. Andrew Station. We used them to achieve a moody sort of look. Anna was dressed all in black, which also helped.
Fuji X-Pro 3
All of the images taken that day were shot using in-camera JPEGs on my Fuji X-Pro 3. I programmed a few Film Simulation recipes from Life Unintended's blog, here: https://lifeunintended.com/articles/my-favorite-fujifilm-film-simulation-settings/
These were adapted from the film simulation recipes found on Fuji-X Weekly's blog: https://fujixweekly.com/recipes/
I used the "X-Trans IV" recipe found on Life Unintended's blog, which uses Fuji's Classic Neg simulation as a base. I found that overexposing this recipe by around 1 stop gives me really ideal results. This is because the blacks tend to crush rather quickly, but because of this great sensor, the highlights can actually handle quite a bit of overexposure. Like, a surprising amount. And when shooting in-camera JPEGs, you get a really pleasing highlight rolloff which almost mimics (dare I say it) actual film. Combined with the in-camera grain effects, I find that overexposing my shots gives me a really great look with this camera. I will use this more often, and I'm already planning on using it during my next wedding shoot this summer.
