Burrary Street Bridge - Vancouver

The Burrard Street Bridge connects downtown Vancouver with the quite fashionable and ever trendy micro burb of Kistsilano. On July 1st 2002 it quietly celebrated it's 70th birthday having faithfully supported the ever increasing automotive, bicycle and pedestrian traffic since 1932. During it's peak period, the morning rush, 9,000+ Vancouverites and assorted tourists toddle across it's art deco funkiness.

To the right is a photo of this nifty piece of concrete and iron art deco taken at night last January 26th around 7:15 PM. The bridge is enough of a landmark to have been featured in each of the past 3 releases of Microsoft Flight Simulator's scenery for Vancouver and, with a large enough telescope mounted on the Space Shuttle, can be seen from space.

You can find some pretty nifty info on the bridge via this Wikipedia article -> The Burrard Street Bridge.

I really like this shot for several reason.

First, the color rendition is quite close to the natural palette as I remember it. I used a relatively short exposure of 1.5 seconds and an f-stop of 4.5 with an ISO setting of 400. Going for a short exposure prevented the creep to orange that longer exposure photos tend to become.

My second reason for liking this shot is I adjusted it (very slightly) via my nacient skills using what I've a hunch will become my main stream photo processing program - Nikon's Capture NX. After just a few hours with the program I'm quickly converting from a card carrying member of the digital photo purest camp to the poster boy for digital manipulation goodness.

The most impressive thing so far about Capture NX is that it is smart enough to effectively create it's own masks of what sections in a photo should or should not be adjusted. I've been intimidated with both the sophistication and the layer managment in Photoshop to the point that I've never got to the "Oh my God this is too cool!" moment with it. With Capture NX on the other hand by page 11 of the manual I'd learned more than enough to be dangerous and had half a dozen "Oh my God this rocks!" moments with half a dozen shots from the past few months. Even the grey wet Vancouver winter photos seemed to be reborn after 10 minutes with Capture NX.

Expect some pretty cool photos over the next few days.