SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, Nikon D100, Tamron 24-135mm @65mm, 1/500 f11
Notes: Yes, I know, this is your standard postcard shot of a City landmark, probably of interest only to tourists, right? This is part of my series from the recent waterfront walk & shoot. This shot is cropped, I cropped the woman and cell phone out of the bottom of the picture. The sun angle was perfect to light up the bridge towers. It really highlighted them, and I liked the look. Folks, I feel like I'm posting pictures into the twilight zone. I need to know that I'm not wasting my time here. Any form of acknowledgement will work.
Thanks for reading.
-- Warren
posted by Warren T. at 7:48 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Jill, thanks for the comments! I REALLY appreciate it. You're right, I may have chopped off too much of the water under the bridge. There was a railing there. The woman with the phone was there too. I'll have to look at the original to see how much water is there. As for the lighting, a lot of it has to do with being at the right place at the right time, and being able to "see" and recognize it.
-- Warren
Standard Postcard? Maybe...But pick 10 tourist walking by at the same time and maybe only one would get close to the shot and composition as good as this. Lighting is everything in photography, and knowing your equipment well enough to capture it to be "postcard perfect" is not as easy as most would think.
I agree with Jill...more water would balance and feel better. I would also try to eliminate the post of some sort on the lower right...a slight distraction.
Lighting is great. It would be interesting to see a series on the bridge with other lighting, such as sunset/sunrise, or moonrise!
Lighting is fantastic.
Thanks Dennis. I went back to the original shot and I saw that just under that sliver of water on the bottom was the concrete railing. the woman's head was positioned just above the railing. I felt that in this composition, the railing and woman would distract from the main subject, which was the bridge.
Given the transitive nature of certain scenes, there is not much time to attain perfection, but the exciting, fun, and stimulating challenge (at least for me), is to get the optimum shot given the particular circumstances. For example, I saw that lightpost on the right side of the picture at the time. To exclude the lightpost, I would have had to change my position and focal length, but that would have spoiled the appearance of the bridget that I wanted. Also, I was not sure yet if I wanted to include the woman in this shot, so I had her positioned in the ideal position, and I didn't want to take too long before clicking by walking around to remove the lightpost. In order to be unobtrusive, I took 4 shots of this scene in about 30 seconds. On one of them, I excluded the lightpost, but I didn't like it as much as this one because of the reason mentioned above. I posted one of the other shots previously, where I liked the appearance of the woman in the foreground. I thought that one added drama even though nobody commented on it. The "thought" of postprocessing is ever present in the mind, but the goal is to achieve as much perfection (or how you envisioned the final image) in-camera as possible. Just musing on some ideas, I hope you found it interesting.
-- Warren
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