Wabash Bridge at Sunset (Drive By Shooting):

When I left work tonight the sky was absolutely incredible.  The blue, magenta, and firey oranges and yellows were exploding at the edge of one of the many storm fronts that came through today.  I had the camera (imagine that) but the light was fading fast and time was not on my side.  Every second wasted was an exponential reduction in photographicalis magnificantae.  I had to face up to the fact that I was not going to get to a stationary location to do gods painting justice so I just rolled down the window and shot the following image at 78 miles per hour on highway 370 from the Discovery Bridge just after passing through the truss section heading west into St. Charles out of Earth City.  For the traffic safety "More Holy than thou" types, yes it was a pretty stupid move (Things look kinda crazy fast through the Nikkor 50mm at 78 miles per hour) but I think the image below was worth the risk.....

Wabash at Sunset (D3s, ISO 3200, 1/3200th, f/1.4, -1EV through Nikkor 50mm Prime)

Remember to click on the image to enlarge it to your screen.

Photog's Note:

The reality was that the most dangerous part was setting up the D3S for 78mph nite vision mode.  I knew I was only going to get one chance at this image so I set the camera to fire a bracket of 3 images, chose 3200 ISO and opened the 50mm up to f/1.4 for maximum light gathering.  When I looked through the viewfinder I saw my shutter was 1/3200 but it was too freakin' late to adjust the ISO down to 1600 or 800 to maximize image quality and still keep the shutter above the 1/600th threshold needed to nail the bridge without it being a blur as fast as I was going.  This wasn't tripod shooting here so shutter was important.  I also had to have the exposure nailed before I framed it so I just pointed the camera at the sky and set the exposure lock (thats the little AE-L/AF-L button on every Nikon for those who haven't read their camera manual) to guarantee that the bridge would be a silhouette and the sky would rock.  Had I just pointed it to the bridge and let the camera brain do all the thinking, I would have ended up with a yellowish cloudy dot with no dramatic sky and a greyish grainy looking bridge.  For the discerning eye, you can see that the color rendering of the magenta and red is kinda crappy and blown out.  Had I been able to stop the car, get out on the shoulder with a tripod and take a bracket of 9 images for HDR (Assuming I didn't die a horrible death at the bumber of another rush hour driver), I could have nailed it in post processing without blowing out the reds.  If you peek at the pixels on the above image, you will see some noise from 3200 ISO but most notably the edges of the trusswork are kinda wavy with some red fringing and the few powerlines lack definition.  For those who do not know, this is the difference between the $350 50mm prime and one of the $2000 lenses with Nano-Coating and better glass.  Had I shot this with the 24-70mm Nikkor you would see nothing but a perfectly black edge with no red fringe.  Could I fix it in photoshop?  Absolutely but then I couldn't talk about it in the blog could I?  The quality of this image will relegate it to a doomed life on the web and in a 4x6 or 5x7 print forever but its still a great shot for 78mph!  That's a whole lotta crap to think about for the 8 seconds going onto the bridge and 2 seconds of shooting about 9 attempts at this huh?  It takes a lot of practice and an almost psychic knowledge of your cameras controls/settings to pull it off considering the camera never even had its lens cap off until I got ON the bridge.  There was only some minor post-processing for noise and sharpness in Lightroom 3 after all.  Thats why I am so proud of this image even though it kind of sucks from a quality perspective.

Until the next image theft....

Enjoy!