Foto Friday 19 – Bridges

Bridging the Gap

walk

Whenever I travel (which hasn’t been often since 2020), I try to set aside some time to walk around without a plan or agenda, soak in the place, linger, watch, and observe. The images here were taken in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the bridge is called Oberkasseler Brücke, close to the old town district.

I was walking along the Rhine towards the bridge as the sun was setting (maybe I should include a sunset shot), and I decided to wait for the blue hour to commence, not that you can tell, since I converted them into black and white, or maybe you can?

run

I stayed at that bridge for some time and took many shots. People coming, people going, people on bikes, people running, stretching, pausing, looking out onto the river before disappearing.

Sometimes, you need to run to get that shot, to bridge that gap, before the moment is gone. Shooting with a fixed lens necessitates moving about a lot to get to the perfect spot from which to shoot, to capture that elusive decisive moment. The photos here were shot using a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L, one of the finest lenses I own (and which I might sell soon).

Of course, you can cut and crop, but somehow, there seems to be something inexplicably wrong with that idea, a notion of destroying that geometry you captured, and no amount of cropping can save a bad photograph.

There are many instances where photos are cropped and used effectively, very famous ones, sold for lots of money, too. Crop if you must, by all means. Still, the real magic happens when you don’t need to crop. When what you captured is exactly as it should be, or at least you feel that way. It’s the same way with writing. When you know, you know. The decisive moment, for me, is all about composition.

Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term decisive moment¹, “capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.”

Does that apply here? Maybe it does. Maybe, it doesn’t. Life by its very nature, is ephemeral, and every moment is decisive.

return

When you want to go places, real or otherwise, you will traverse bridges, real or otherwise, and we will do well to keep them strong, build bridges where needed. Bridge the gap. When you don’t, things tend to happen from which there is no return.

they burn their bridges
they burn their ships
they burn their houses
and they burn their beds
while their children sleep
when the last bridge falls
when there’s nothing left to burn
when the fires die they shall weep

Outtakes

silent running

Silent running, keeping their distance.

last exit

Run until the last exit. Time to go home, or rather, back to the hotel, which did not entail crossing that bridge, but I did it anyway. There and back again.

crossing

As mentioned in one of my previous Foto Friday posts, I usually take panos with my phone, and so I did here while crossing.

And since I was there during sunset and waited for the blue hour, here are some colour shots from that same bridge. Hope you enjoy them. Until next time.

Sunset Bridge

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Previously on FotoFriday…

1. https://www.henricartierbresson.org/publications/henri-cartier-bresson-the-decisive-moment/