Along the Liffey

My early-morning trip to and from the airport on Sunday took me home through the city centre, and with my camera in the boot of the car I was able to take advantage of the quiet streets and some lovely light from the rising sun to get this shot.

If you’ve come here from Damien Mulley’s blog or the Galway Advertiser you’re most welcome – read more about this photo after the jump and then have a browse around… if you want a lucky dip click the link at the bottom of each page to ‘shuffle’ through the blog.

I took this photo on the banks of the River Liffey, at the southern end of the Sean O’Casey foot bridge, which provides a shortcut across the river for pedestrians in the heart of Dublin’s financial district.  The bridge is currently alongside it’s soon-to-be-installed new neighbour, the Samuel Beckett bridge, which will provide a similar shortcut for cars and buses.

As I mentioned, there was lovely light at this time of the morning (about 8.30am), but it was continually changing, with a very cloudy sky causing large variations in the light at any particular moment.

I had stopped here to get a photo from the centre of the bridge looking west towards O’Connell Street, but before that I thought this scene would make a nice photograph.

The first step was to settle on the composition – for that I needed to decide the camera position, the lens, and the framing.  The sign post prompted me to try  some portrait-format shots first, but when I rotated the camera back 90 degrees, in my mind the landscape format offered more promise.

I wanted to keep as much of the bridge in the frame, but also the leading line of the paving stones along the edge of the footpath.  That dictated that I used a wide angle lens, so I put my 17-50mm lens at 17mm.

The composition fell into place once the orientation and lens were selected – I needed to exclude an ugly election poster that was on a no parking sign just to my left, so that gave me a boundary to work from.  I tried to keep within the rule of thirds, positioning the signpost about 1/3rd of the way in from the left of the frame, which resulted in the lamp post falling about 1/3rd of the way in from the right.  Additionally I aimed the camera down a little to raise the horizon line towards the top of the frame, conscious of the lovely cobble stones which I wished to have in the foreground, but equally conscious of the wonderful atmospheric and moody sky which you rarely get in conjunction with sun, and so still kept a large part of the sky in the frame.

After that it was just a matter of waiting for the right light.  That didn’t take long, and so I didn’t miss it while trying to adjust my exposure, I used aperture priority mode, set my aperture, and played around with exposure compensation until the histogram looked good and the LCD screen showed a shot along the lines of what I was thinking of.

When the right light did fall across the scene, I fired off maybe three shots, and in post processing could see that this one had the most promise.

I love the sky in this shot, I love the cobbles, and for some reason I especially love the shadow of the sign posts.  I know… I can’t explain why either.

Incidentally, if you look at the exposure details you’ll see that the sunny-16 rule held true again!