Behind the Image: Dublin Taxis at Night

I had been walking for three hours and had nothing. That is normal. The pictures that end up as prints almost never arrive in the first hour — they arrive when you have stopped performing photography and started just looking.

The rank was six cars deep, engines running, wipers going, every windscreen throwing back a different piece of the street. I stood across the road long enough for one driver to wind his window down and ask what I was doing. When I told him, he shrugged and said, just drive — meaning, I think, stop thinking about it.

Hand-held at a thirtieth of a second, wide open, there is no version of this frame that is technically clean. The tail lights smear slightly. That smear is the picture; a tripod would have killed it.

It prints darker than most people expect. On Hahnemühle Photo Rag the blacks hold their texture rather than collapsing, so the wet road keeps its grain and the reflections stay as light rather than turning into flat white shapes.