The Tagus River
As with most images (particularly the travel ones), there’s a funny story behind this one.
During the summer I spent a couple of weeks in Portugal trying to see as much of the country as possible. One of the must-visit places to photograph was the Tagus River with the 25 de Abril bridge spanning across it. I wanted to do this during the blue hour so I saved one evening just for this. The weather wasn’t perfect with a lot of low hanging clouds, but I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to try my Singh-Ray Vari ND filter and take some long exposure shots with the fast moving clouds blurred.
So I setup the shot early, waiting for the sky to turn into an interesting colour and the bridge to be lit up. The sky did its part, but the bridge lights didn’t! Let me explain… It seems that for some odd reason only half of the bridge was lit. Now, I’m not sure if this was because the Portuguese government is trying to save some electricity money, but this happened in the next few evenings as well, so I never managed to get a shot with the whole bridge lit up.
In fact, this was probably the only disappointment of my whole trip, as even with all the lights on, I really felt that this beautiful bridge was not showcased properly. The lights are very small and of different colours (the street lights are yellow, while the bridge lights are white) and at night the bridge is hardly visible.