Persistence

The other night I showed you the pathway within two hours of shooting it. With a bit of time, I used the slideshow feature of Bridge to look at the images, giving stars to those with potential, eventually including this version which is better than the original in two ways - the sun has moved round a bit and is just barely shining on this side of the concrete. Instead of a single cyclist in the distance going away, now I have two cyclists, one in each direction and significantly closer.

I stayed with the walkway shot for the better part of half an hour. I grabbed the first shot less than a minute after pulling up - afraid something would go wrong with the light.I later moved a bit closer and switched to a shorter lens to get a less obstructed view of the bottom of the walkway at the near end. I took a number of shots, adjusting exposure as I went and watching the histogram for blown highlights as I went. A couple of cyclists decided to stop on the pathway near the bridge, spoiling the clean lines of the composition. They were a bit far away to ask them to move and I waited them out for more than 15 minutes before they slowly got their act together and rolled off. Fortunately I still barely had the right light and was able to catch this image within seconds of them leaving.

Exposure was 1/50 at f10 Of course I'd have liked to use f16 for maximum depth of field but that would have involved too slow a shutter speed. I could have raised the ISO of the camera but my 1Ds2 is fairly noisy at higher ISO's and even 400 is a compromise. The other issue is that in the failing light I was having to adjust things - a camera with a dial in ISO selector sure would be nice - there was no time after the layabouts finally moved off to fiddle with menus.

Anyway, the image worked, it makes a nice print and if the furthest pillars aren't absolutely crisp, it hardly matters. It's actually pretty amazing how well the cyclists turned out for 1/50 second, the joys of them moving straight at and away from the camera.