Curves

One of my favorite things about roller coasters is that I view them as large scale pieces of art that also move, creating an interesting subject to photograph. Even when you don't get the train, a well-designed ride is beautiful in its own right, and when you find the perfect angle, the shapes and design really shine through. This is something I kind of subconsciously realized as a young roller coaster enthusiast tinkering with photography, but as I've grown as a photographer I have started to really recognize and more fully appreciate the beauty of the ride structure on its own. In a busy park it can sometimes be challenging to isolate an interesting feature of a ride, so sometimes a compromise must be made with the background, or ideally there will be a complimenting object to accompany the focus of the picture. For this particular image, I really struggled for a good 10-15 walking around the coaster trying to find an angle that I liked, and even contemplated switching to my fisheye to see if that would give me something I liked. Then I saw it, and managed to line everything up with the track crossover in the upper left corner. I had it, the "money shot" for this ride, the picture below.

Obviously this was not quite the straight out of the camera version, but there really isn't a whole lot of tweaking I did to this in post-processing. I just did some saturation and shadow adjustments to accentuate the lighting and the lines the shadows created with the coaster tracks. The Skycoaster in the background made for a very nice background object, although I wouldn't have been opposed to a completely clear blue sky background as well.

The roller coaster pictured is the Freedom Flyer, a Vekoma junior invert at Fun Spot America, new for 2013. It was part of their big expansion, doubling the size of the park and adding a GCI wooden coaster (White Lightning), a Skycoaster, and a few flats. As far as standard Vekoma junior inverts go, it is pretty fun, and spending most of its time flying around above the midways instead of a confined, empty ride area enhances the ride a bit and makes it much more visually appealing.

As always, you can find more of my work on Flickr, 500px, and buy this and other select images on Fine Art America. Thanks for reading and I'll see you on Friday!