On my last night in India I found myself standing on a traffic island outside of Victoria Terminus in central Mumbai. “VT”–as it is popularly known–is a UNESCO World Heritage site, but it is also the busiest train station in Asia.
The activity is crazy both inside the station and out. After three months of biking across India, I am quite intimate with Indian traffic, but things are even more nuts than normal around the VT.
This shot was remarkably challenging for a number of reasons. First, there is a short window to shoot dusk shots when the sun is down but there is still a nice glow in the sky. The lights of the buildings didn’t come on until well into this period, narrowing the window dramatically. But the key to this shot is to get the lights of the traffic streaking across the streets outside the station, only the traffic was at an absolute standstill for most of the time I was out there.
I think I have only seen true gridlock on a couple of occasions in my life and this was one of them. I stood there, dancing from foot to foot, yelling at bus drivers who entered an intersection that they could not possibly clear, watching my light disappear. But finally, as the last minutes of my last night in India passed, so too did the worst of the traffic jam and I was able to get the panorama I hoped for.
