The Bridge
Unveiling the beauty of long exposure potography
The Severn Bridge
“It takes a genius to turn the M48 motorway bridge into a work of art”
That was a comment left by a friend who saw this image of mine. As lovely as the comment was, genius is a bit of a stretch. Technique and practice are all that’s required.
How then do you turn a lump of large-scale engineering into photographic fine art? In this post, I’m going to show you how I captured this stunning fine art image of the iconic Severn Bridge.
To start with, a little research is required. How do I access the viewpoint I require? When will high tide on the estuary coincide with first light? What other images of the subject already exist and how can I put my twist on them?
First stop is Google Maps. By using the satellite view and then street view, I could see that the point I needed to get to was serviced by a public road. Drop a pin, simple.
Next was using an app called My Tide Times. By choosing the nearest tide monitoring point I could see that, rather fortuitously, a visit I had planned to Cardiff coincided with a very high tide first thing in the morning. This was important because the Severn Estuary has an astounding tidal range, up to 15m (or over 49ft), which means unless you plan the photo for high tide, there’s every possibility you’ll arrive to discover a humongous brown riverbed in front of your lens.
By checking Google images, I could get a feel of what viewpoints would be available when I got to the destination and how people had shot the structure previously.
At the time of taking this, it’s just turning to autumn (Fall) in the UK, so sunrise is a little later, meaning I didn’t need to get up at 4 a.m. to start my journey. But I wanted the early light. The sun rises in the east, hence me being on the Welsh side of the river, to ensure the light hitting the bridge comes from in front and slightly to the left of my lens.
Shooting into the light and with the sun just off to the left of frame would ensure the bridge would have depth in the light and shadow that fell on it. The sunlight also reflects off the water and hits back up under the bridge to naturally lift some of the deeper shadows.
I often enjoy shooting large structures as black and white images. If I combined this with a long exposure to smooth the water flowing through, I would create an image not often seen online. Research done, it was time to get on with it.
As the plan for the image is a large-scale print, I’m using my Fujifilm GFX 100s and my lens is set at 50mm. The aperture is set to f16 to ensure a sharp image throughout the frame. And so we come to the little bit of magic. The little accessory that will enable me to turn the chaos of water flowing through the estuary, into a smooth surface creating a sense of grandeur and calm. The Lee Big Stopper filter. This is a lens filter that cuts out 10 stops of light from entering our lens. In turn, this means a much longer time is required to keep our shutter open. To calculate exactly how long, there’s a handy app from Lee Filters. Firstly you get the shutter speed for a photo without the filter. Input the shutter speed for a standard shot at the aperture you want to use, and the app will tell you the equivalent shutter setting with the filter in place. In this instance, without the filter, I’d need to set a speed of 1/15th of a second. Input that into the app and it tells me I need a shutter setting of 60 seconds.
Before I press the shutter button, there are still a couple of things to check. As this is a long exposure, I don’t want any movement of the camera, so I set a two-second timer so there’s no chance of me moving the camera before the shutter opens. Next, ensure the camera is attached to a sturdy tripod. And finally, make sure any inbuilt stabilisation is turned off. Over a 60-second exposure, I don’t want the camera to think it needs to make movement adjustments.
Once I’d got a few shots in the bag, it was time to process them on the computer. As I concentrated on getting the exposure correct, I didn’t need to make too many adjustments in Lightroom so I could concentrate on the aesthetics of the image. Putting a preset on the image, I just needed to make adjustments to ensure the image looked as I’d envisioned. But then I tried something that gave me turmoil. I tried a light and airy colour version… and I liked it.
The Severn Bridge, colour version.
The conclusion to take away from this is that even with the most solid of plans, occasionally a curveball is thrown at us and we just have to go with it.
So, colour or black & white, which is your favourite?
Here’s a link to the ‘making of’ video on my YouTube channel - The Bridge
