The Long Walk Home
The Long Walk Home
This was a really hard photo to take.
One Saturday night in May 2021, I decided to head into the city for a “walking photographic tour”. Starting at Hyde Park, I walked the city CBD, down to the Quay, then for the first time ever, north across the Harbour Bridge to Milsons Point.
I’d driven, caught a train, run a marathon, even rode my bike across the bridge, but never had I walked it - let alone at night. It was actually very etheric. Early winter, cold, dark, grey steel surrounds.
I set up my tripod a little onto the bridge just north of the South Pylon. Unsure of what image I as after, I merely stayed there for a while and looked for a composition. There was the Opera House, the harbour, the city even. All cliche and pretty boring in the scheme of things.
Looking across the bridge itself I noticed the leading lines. They are a compositional technique where man made or natural lines lead the viewer's eyes through a photograph to the subject, or the heart of the image. The guard rails, the ornate overhead light fittings, even the footpath itself drew my own eye to the arch in the centre of the sandstone Northern Pylon.
Looking closer I saw the curvature of the walkway, then the bridge itself as it spanned the harbour below. You don’t tend to see that at 70km/h in a car.
That was the shot and all I needed now was a subject. A pedestrian. Making the image so difficult was the light, and of course the movement. I decided to leave ISO low as the image was “grainy” enough, and aperture open enough at f5.6 to maximise the depth of field. That left the shutter speed at a ridiculously slow 1.3 seconds rendering any “moving” subject to be slightly blurred. That was OK as it added to the artistry of the image. But, passing traffic, buses, cars and even trains, jolted the bridge underfoot with surprising ferocity. That of course moved the tripod and camera blurring the entire image and not just the chosen subject.
As luck would finally have it, a lone man fortuitously dressed in jeans and 3/4 black leather jacket passed my set up on his way across the bridge. Trying to time my triggers between bridge movement and the mans position within the frame, I fired off a dozen images in the hope of getting lucky. In the end, I think I did.
I really like this image for a number of reasons, but I remember that shoot as a very steep learning curve in night photography particularly.
200mm. f/5.6. 1.3sec. ISO 100.