The literal “travel” part of travel–at least when it comes to flying–is not pleasant. Ever busier airports, especially ones like O’Hare, and ever smaller seating space and ever more limited service on the planes themselves. (I like driving, especially if I’m going through a region I’ve not been in before.) But I do like photographing in airports, So, there’s that. Here’s a few in O’Hare International in Chicago, while I was waiting between flights.
What captivates me about airports is the architecture, especially all the glass and reflections the glass creates, and especially when you have people come into the frame. My approach is to set up an interesting frame, with glass and reflections that mix up inside and outside or mix-up multiple inside spaces. Then, if it’s the right kind of scene, I wait for a person (or people) to go through or sit down. For all of the images below, I used a Kodak Portra recipe from Fuji X Weekly, slightly tweaking the resulting JPEGs’ contrast and shadows in LR.
In the first one, the person was standing there for a while, but the scene felt too empty until the bus showed up. The second one was most about the architecture, so I did not wait for more people.
The next three are more abstract. Rather than people walking through the scenes, it is their shadow-like reflections or the way a window frames a reflected image of a person. In the first two, they look ghost-like and seem to be walking in the air. In the last, my favorite of the O’Hare images, I was about to give up. The windows and reflections were not quite enough to make an interesting photo. Then the person with coffee sat down, his reflection appearing in the corner of the series of windows. Perfect!
I’d love to do some images of the inside of he terminals in O’Hare. But all the ones that I imagine really liking would require a drone. I’m pretty confident I would not be able to get permission to do that!
Enjoy!
No Ordinary Light 