First Take On the Sundial Bridge

So here's my first stab at shooting the very photographed Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA. Well, OK I have photographed it before, but just snap-shot stuff with the family. And then there was Chris & Stephanie's engagement session, but I was photographing them, not the bridge - it was just kinda there in the background. So cut me some slack.


Actually, I was driving around downtown Redding at dusk looking for something stock-worthy to shoot, nothing was jumping out at me so I thought, what the heck, I'll give the bridge a try even though the sky didn't look so great. Well, I get there and I'm walking all over the place, looking, looking for a decent angle, all the while the light is quickly slipping away (kind of like my youth - wait, that slipped away a long time ago, never mind). I finally take off way down stream & find two of the things I'm looking for: A cove-type area where the water is still & I'm able to get a nice, smooth reflection off the Sacramento River and an angle where I can get some rocks in the foreground.

Bad thing is by now, it's practically dark - not the situation I wanted to work in. I'm actually having to use a flashlight to set this shot up. So I grab my Manfrotto 055XB tripod which I love, because I can pull the center shaft, spread the legs straight out, and I'm just a few inches off the ground - just call me a low-rider at this point. Here's the other equipment used: Canon 1Ds MkII, Canon 16-35 2.8 L lens (zoomed to 24mm), RS-80N3 cable release, 580 EX flash with a Wescot 43" double-folding umbrella, and a couple of Pocket Wizards.

GEEK WARNING: The rest of this is a little on the techy-nerdy side, so if you're into that sort of thing, read on. If not, just know that this was not a set-it-on-auto-and-see-what-happens kinda of shot, which brings me to one of my soap box things: Learn what you need to know so you can create whatever photo your creativity dreams up. It's a shame to have a vision for something and then not be able to pull it off. Believe me, I'm constantly learning so I can do tomorrow what I couldn't do yesterday. OK, off my box now.

Because of the lighting hand I was dealt, I knew I would have to do something creative to record & merge the different tones in this scene. I decided to go with 3 different exposures, shown below, and then merge, mask, ect. in Photoshop. The following photos are straight out of Lightroom with no editing, just the way I pulled them into Photoshop:

This shot was to record just the bridge itself. It was sooooo bright in comparison to the rest of the scene, I knew it would need its own exposure. I wasn't sure how much of the fore-ground would show, so I went with a high f-stop to get all the depth of field possible. Exposure was 81 seconds at f22.







Second shot was to record the sky. I needed a LOT more exposure to pull up some color in what looked to the naked eye to be a black sky. I wasn't concerned about foreground & didn't want to be waiting on what would have been a 16 minute exposure at f22, so I went with a 16 sec exposure instead at f2.8.





Final one, to have the rocks looking good in the shot I did an exposure with my strobe fired into an umbrella (for soft, twilight looking light). 1/60 sec at f22 for sharp focus.









Now to Photoshop. I stacked these three photos into one psd file, applied a layer mask to each and "erased" the parts in each shot I wanted to "go away". Then, I applied a couple of layer adjustments (saturation, +59 and levels for an overall exposure tweak). Next, I took this back into Lightroom and did some local exposure correction with the Adjustment Brush, lightening the tree line and toning down the bridge a little. Crop, vignette and I call it done.

I kind of rushed through that last bit, so if you'd like more of an explanation, let me know.

My bottom line on all this, go ahead and shoot, even if you think the light won't work out, include some foreground in your landscape photos, and keep looking for the cool angles even if it takes a while. Happy shooting!