During on of our walks in, when we were in Hamburg on a city trip, I came across this view from the Poggenmühlbridge. Immediately, I remembered I had this view as a wallpaper on my computer for months. I was desperate to photograph this place in the late evening and I convinced my wife to visit this spot again when it was becoming dark. When we returned a couple of photographers were already there. All waiting with their camera's on their tripods. I never take my tripod with me on these kind of short breaks with Jill. The focus is us-time, not photographing.
It was getting darker and darker outside, while there were still no lights on the buildings. I started to lose hope to take a decent picture without my tripod. To be honest, I was also getting nervous and wanted to leave because we were late for our restaurant which we booked. I changed our reservation up front to a later moment for this occasion, but even that time we couldn’t make anymore. My wife convinced me to stay since we already were waiting for more than an hour.
While we were waiting, we talked to the photographer and his wife, who were standing next to us. Seems I’m not the only one who drags his wife with him, to photograph something. They were from Frankfurt and it was not his first time taking pictures of night scenes. His portfolio was rather impressive.
Suddenly all the lights went on! Using the railing of the bridge was too tricky and normally in these kind of situations I would of used my camera bag to rest my camera on. I didn’t have my bag with me since I was traveling as light as possible with my new mirrorless setup. But my newly met acquaintance from Frankfurt had a really big camera backpack. I was no problem to use it. Because of that I needed to use a very low viewpunt, which wasn’t a bad thing.
I quickly shot a couple of pictures before we left for the restaurant. We arrived almost an hour late and unfortunate our table was gone. I can’t blame them. After we apologized and told our story, they managed to free another table!
I didn’t have a chance to HDR bracket this scene, because I wasn’t photographing on a sturdy tripod. I watched to histogram very closely to be careful not to blow my highlights. At home, when post processing this picture in Lightroom I managed to recover all the juicy details from the shadows. The dynamic range of the Nikon Z7 is quite impressive. When my wife asks me what to buy for the holidays, I’ll ask for a good compact travel tripod!
