Taking The Prague Metro

If I told you I was traveling to Prague to photograph the city, you would probably assume I planned to photograph its historic buildings, churches, and landmarks, and you would be right. However, I also had another location on my list: Prague's subway system.

While researching places to photograph before my trip, I came across images of the subway stations and was immediately intrigued. Their clean lines, bold colors, and graphic design inspired me to spend an evening riding the subway and creating a series of photographs.

My goal was to keep the images symmetrical and to photograph them from a consistent height. I chose a cloudy evening, when the weather wasn't ideal for outdoor photography in the city center. Using my Sony a7r III with a Canon 17mm tilt-shift lens mounted on a tripod set low to the ground, I moved from station to station looking for the strongest compositions.

When people see these images, they often assume I photographed them late at night when the stations were empty. In reality, most of the photographs were taken between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m., with plenty of people moving through the stations. To create the clean, empty look, I photographed multiple frames and later blended them together in post-processing to remove the people.

As you might imagine, setting up a tripod in a busy subway station attracted some attention. Many people gave me curious looks, wondering what I was doing, and one homeless man spent several minutes yelling at me. Since I don't speak Czech, I never figured out why he was upset.

Patience was the key to creating these images. Each photograph took anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to complete as I waited for trains to arrive, passengers to leave, and both sides of the station to clear. In the end, the effort was well worth it. I was thrilled with the final images and look forward to creating more photographs like these in subway systems around the world.