A bridge in Philly
South Street Bridge - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Images from: Dec 2nd, 2024
Experiments in semi-long exposure to get motion blur, handheld.
Hey, look, a dirty lens / sensor ! I’m sure I noticed later in the walk.
This set comes from a small photo walk I did while my son was having surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which, as I understand it, is one of, if not THE, best children’s hospitals in the world.
Even given that clout, I needed to get my mind off of what was going on, so I went out for a stroll to get some coffee.
I checked the map for “pourover”, which is my short-hand for how to find quality coffee quickly. The place has to be a certain level of serious to even offer pourovers, so it’s a good trick. Stash that one in your bag.
The walk involved leaving the gulch of futuristic buildings around CHOP and crossing the South Street bridge to get to the next neighborhood over.
As I crossed the frigid, windy bridge, gleaming light on the skyline caught my eye. I’m not acquainted enough with the Philly skyline to tell you what any of those buildings are, but I’m guessing the “+MC” is some sort of hospital, and it’s a collection of party announcers.
The experiment I choose to perform here it one of my main interests in getting my Fujifilm XH-2 - notably, really good in-body image stabilization (IBIS). This means that the sensor can counter-giggle to compensate your for wiggly-giggling the camera with your amped up coffee fingers. My (relatively) old school Canon 6D didn’t have any of that fancy magic.
My major reason for wanting this feature is so I can ‘drag’ the shutter, meaning leave it open longer, while the camera keeps the image stable across any movement from my body. Why do I want this? To introduce motion blur to give architectural images a sense of life, all without the need for a tripod.
I like a tripod, don’t get me wrong - but I also really like going on photo walks, and sometimes I just want to take a quick architectural photo in the moment, without having to pull the thing out, set it up, put the camera on it, set up the shot - you get the idea.
With this, I just hold the camera steady and drop the shutter down to something I want, like these images at 1/20th of a second.
This one’s got the most action, what with two cars and two cyclists, all with a similar level of motion blur as they make their way across the scene - and that blur gives you some action to the image, making it clear that these things are going somewhere, not just standing still.
At the same time, you can see that the roadway is tack sharp, no camera shake in sight. This used to an impossible shot for me to get without significantly bracing the camera and my body against a wall, or using a tripod.
I’d call it a big win.
Looking back on the images now, I wish I’d shot something a little wider, with just one car and one bicycle. Even better I could have worked a pedestrian in there for the trifecta. But getting all of those in the same moment would have required waiting longer for the stars to aline, and let’s remember that I’m out here for a *walk*, not a mission to make one perfect photo here.
In order for the images to not be insanely bright thanks to all the light that 1/20th of a second lets in, I had to close the aperture all the way down to its maximum of f/22. While this gets the job done, it also tends to reveal every little bit of dust and grim on the camera’s lens and sensor, since everything is more in focus than at wider apertures. So, you tend to want to avoid it, because it’s almost impossible to keep the camera immaculately clean - unless you’re literally cleaning it before every session, or even every photo.
Seeing that little grim in the top left, I know that’s on the sensor. I haven’t been able to find my cleaning solution since I’ve moved so much of my equipment around the house so much, so I just ordered a new bottle. So that little problem will be a thing of the past tomorrow.
Granted, I could have removed that mess in post, but I’m trying to come around to being less precious about every image I share here.
Also, if I’d cleaned it up, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, would we? It’s good to be transparent about these things.
And, funny enough, it turns out this empty photo, where I didn’t need all that fancy shutter speed and stabilization magic, is actually my favorite from the set.
Something about the calm, quiet, stillness really does it for me. I also like the colors, and the two street lights anchoring the skyline on each side.
What do you say we crop this one down to just the best bits?
There we go. That’s the money.
It’s funny how often I’ve shot a vertical / portrait image recently, just to decide I like it better cropped into a landscape orientation. As I start to move away from using the phone so much as the primary display platform, and using this iPad so much more (in landscape / laptop mode), it’s ahem opening my eyes a bit.
And y’know, funny thing about me saying that:
This one actually came from the iPhone screen, so it was cropped 16:9 Vertical when it came back to me.
I’ve been talking about this recently, but I love the way my iPhone and iPad have been pulling up and cropping images from my archive. It’s breathing new life into them for me, and I’m really excited about it. Talk about a great use of AI. Heya, be my photo editor. Help me escape my self doubt of which of these 5 photos of a road is the best one.