Lamar Blvd Bridge, Underbelly – Austin, Texas

For the third and last of the Lamar Blvd Bridge mini-series, we look at the underbelly. The repeating concrete structure has a sculptural quality — the purity of form and function.

To get the glassy water effect, I did a long exposure. A total of 27 seconds, shot of course, on a tripod. Since this was daytime and I didn’t have neutral density filters, I set the aperture to f22 and the ISO to 50. With the Fujifilm GFX 50R, f22 looks good without adverse diffraction, a consideration for cameras with smaller sensors. Though since my usual aperture is f16, one-stop higher isn’t that different.

The three photos of this series show how we can often take very different images of the same mundane subject, and I can think of a lot more. That’s the biggest thing that changed with years of experience. I now see many possible compositions for any subject. When I first started, I struggled to see just one decent perspective — years of training have greatly expanded my options.

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