A couple of days ago, at the end of a post about some photographs I took of the ANZ Stadium in Sydney, I mentioned the Aviva Stadium, newly opened in Dublin, and how I hoped to take some photographs of it sometime soon. Turns out I’d already taken one photograph of it that I had completely forgotten about. It was only when looking through my library of images from the past year last night that I stumbled across it. It’s not the best possible photograph of the Aviva that is up for grabs, but it does have a couple of things going for it – including the vantage point from which it was taken. But there’s also one key element that is missing.
I captured this shot, as the title of the post suggests, from Shelbourne Park – the greyhound track in Ringsend, which neighbours Ballsbridge, home to the Aviva Stadium. I was at Shelbourne Park for a night at the dogs, and upon entering the grandstand caught my first proper glimpse of the soon-to-be-completed Aviva. I was impressed. For anyone who ever lay eyes on its predecessor Landsdowne Road you will appreciate that the Aviva is quite a transformation. Not everyone likes the design it seems – some see it as an eyesore – but I think it’s definitely an improvement over what was there and a nice addition to Ballsbridge’s skyline.
It seems to me also that Shelbourne Park offers one of the best views of the stadium, apart maybe from an aerial one. Without having explored the area too much, any other view I’ve seen of it has been a partially obscured one, although those views offer options for images contrasting the new versus the old.
Apart from the (largely) uninterrupted view of the stadium in this image, there are a couple of smaller details that I like – not all of them intentionally captured, to be honest. One that was intentional is the tractor in the foreground, slightly blurred to show that it is moving. I used a slow shutter speed to achieve the blur, and held off clicking the shutter until it was a third of the way across the frame (though I should have let it pass the post that it partially blocking it!). Also intentional is the crop – a letterbox crop which cuts out lots of unimportant detail (in this shot) in the foreground, and indeed unnecessary sweeps of sky.
Speaking of the sky, I hoped that I would be able to retain detail in it, and managed to do that. I was at the mercy of the time of day to some extent in achieving that because I also wanted to keep detail in the internally-lit commentary box that you see at the right of the frame. That meant that to determine my exposure I used this commentary box as much as the overall frame to tie down an aperture/ISO combination that worked with the slow shutter speed I used for the tractor motion blur.
The fact that the exposures balance nicely is something I didn’t have much control over. Obviously had I had to sacrifice one of the two exposures – the commentary box (artificially lit) or the stadium (naturally lit), I’d have sacrificed the commentary box exposure, but was lucky to be able to hold both.
I also like the kiss of sunlight off the stadium itself, which is unintentional but adds a nice highlight to the structure and helps make it more 3-dimensional in the image.
Returning to this vantage point for a photograph on the evening of a match in the stadium could make for a special image, because the stadium being floodlight would really make it photograph well, assuming that it was possible to balance that floodlit stadium with the ambient light and, ideally, that artificially-lit commentary box. Getting two of them to balance would be possible if the time of evening was correct. Getting all three to balance might not be possible, at least without merging different exposures.
With the stadium lights off in this shot there was one less thing to think about, but the lack of those lights also means while this shot a good test shot for a later photograph of the stadium, it’s not much more than that.
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