Neal Grosskopf
Trestle Trail Bridge – Menasha, WI
Before & After
I decided to to visit the Trestle Trail Bridge in Menasha since it’s a short 20 minute drive to it from my house. The sunset forecast looked promising as did the sky so I hopped in my car and arrived there around 8:20pm which is about 20 minutes before sunset. I noticed there were a couple low pass clouds overhead that were soaking up some of the sunset’s orange light so I quickly got to work taking pictures.
Location
The bridge is located between the Town of Menasha and the City of Menasha and spans Little Lake Butte Des Morts. The lake is just wide enough that you can get back far enough to see a partial sunset. The bridge has a couple platform areas with benches that make for good photography areas.
Composition
I moved my camera around on the eastern platform a bit trying to find the best angle. Ultimately an angle closer to the bridge span ended up being the shot I decided to process. I also tried to angle my camera so that I included the most cloud cover I could.
The bridge is quite busy with people so the only way to ‘remove them’ is to do long exposure pictures. Since I typically do these this worked to my advantage. I used my 10-stop Formatt-Hitech filter to extend the exposure time in this instance to blur them out as they walked by.
EXIF Information
Post Processing
The total editing time for the image was about 3.5 hours. I had originally taken two sets of three bracketed shots. The first set was a 30 second long exposure that I was planning on using for the non-water elements while I took another set of three using bulb mode. The longest of these being 247 seconds. My intentions were to use both sets of three in post processing but I ended up just using the long exposure set as I was happy with how that turned out.
I ran the bracketed photos through Photomatix using the balanced preset and then tweaked it. After that, in Lightroom I ran through my usual set of changes – added vibrance, clarity, contrast, moved the tinting to be more purple (something I tend to always do, it must be my style?). I also added a vignette as I tend to prefer these in all photos to focus the users attention to the center of the image.
Once I was done with my global changes, I started working on zones of the image. I usually use adjustment brushes in Lightroom to paint over different zones of the image. In this case, the zones were the – water, sky, & bridge. From there I applied different settings to each zone.
Finally, just before I thought I was done, I noticed my long exposure left some hot pixels in the image. I was a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to remove these but I found a great article on how to get rid of hot pixels in Photoshop.
Software Used
- Lightroom
- Photomatix
- Photoshop
Techniques Used
- High-Dynamic-Range