Transport for the future

When I saw the monorail trains at Disney’s Epcot, I wanted to take a photograph that I could make look futuristic once I’d got home. I liked the sweeping angle of the track and the way the sunlight reflected off the windscreen. It didn’t matter that the train was moving away from me because the front and back look identical.

In Photoshop Elements, I tried different filters before finding the stamp filter which reduced the image to a few simple black shapes on a white background. I converted the black to red and used a few gradient filters to add some more colour.

The result seems to be a mix of a Disneyland monorail poster, a science-fiction book and a dance music album.

When Walt Disney and Richard Nixon opened the first monorail in America in 1959, the voice-over for the news report said that the monorail was: “a long step forward into the future… heralding the day when such rapid transit systems will relieve America’s crowded streets and perhaps even bring back the original meaning to the word ‘freeway’”.