- Messages
- 1,369
- Name
- Chris
- Edit My Images
- Yes
I was one of the lucky 50,000 (from 250,000 applicants) who won a place on the Queensferry Crossing Experience, a walk across the new Forth Road Bridge (opened by the Queen on Monday 4th September). Since there is no pedestrian or cycleway provision on this high speed motorway of a bridge this was the only time it could be walked over.
I'd have liked to treat the event as a photographic expedition, but the organisers were very security conscious. Our security passes were carefully validated and scanned. Only small bags were permitted, no food, no drink except one 500ml bottle of water, no tripods, etc.. We would be allowed one hour under escort to walk the 1.7 miles over the bridge. So I decided to treat it as a sightseeing stroll with opportunities to take snapshots. In other words, one handheld camera with one general purpose lens, in my case a Sony A77 (24MP 1.5 crop sensor) and the Tamron 16-300mm.
This photograph was snatched quickly through the window of the top deck of a double decker bus in the approaches to the bridge @ 60mm, f8, 1/320th sec, ISO 100. I took many shots while walking over the bridge, some of which I spent minutes composing etc.. Despite this shot having been snatched quickly with no time to compose or optimise settings, and been taken through window glass from a moving bus, nevertheless it turned out to be one of the best shots of the day. Viewpoint and subject matter trumped the much better shooting conditions while on the bridge.
The sun had gone behind clouds, and ex-camera the shot was squint, wide, dim, flat, and soft. I wanted to make as easily visible as possible the general layout of the bridge -- a central reservation containing the cable teminations, with a two lane roadway on each side. Walkers walked on both sides of the bridge, from near to far on the left, from far to near on the right. The walkers took the outside lanes, beside the semi-transparent planks of the 3.5 meter high wind barriers on the edges of the bridge. The inside lanes were reserved for emergency vehicles picking any who couldn't manage the walk or who broke the rules (no climbing over the barriers etc.). In other words I was aiming for documentary clarity rather than art or indeed realism.
To make these details as clearly visible as possible I boosted contrast, saturation, microcontrast, and sharpened the hell out of it (with unsharp mask). I'm also experimenting with a new RAW image editor, the free version 9 of DxO Optics, so I'm very likely not using it optimally. Despite the ISO 100 all that pushing brought up a lot of noise. I left a lot of luminance noise in the image because that permitted more detail to come through. The displayed image width of 2048 pixels is close to the maximum size the image will stand. Going larger produces little extra detail and a lot of noise and artefacts. The Moire bands in the cabling are there in the largest size. I suspect they were visible to the naked eye as well.
