This is a shot of the Fred Hartman Bridge taken from Evergreen Road on the Baytown, Texas side of the bridge. This was the first shot I took with my Olympus E-3 camera. I took it without much planning or thought - just wanting to take some test pictures to get acquainted with the controls on my new [then] camera. I like the way the shot came out, it just proves that "it's better to be lucky than good!"

Bridge Cables

The Fred Hartman Bridge is a double-diamond cable suspended bridge that spans the Houston Ship Channel between the cities of Baytown and La Porte in Harris County Texas. It’s a very heavily traveled bridge so stopping to take a photograph on the bridge is not necessarily the best of ideas. Unfortunately neither is snapping a shot of the cables while you’re driving at 65 MPH but we do what we must for our craft, right?

I like the perspective in the photo, emphasized by the converging lines of the cables. I also like the way the bright yellow cables pop against the blue sky and the geometric pattern they create. To me it’s a simple straight forward shot, no story here – just a pleasing aesthetic.

I took the shot with my Panasonic Lumix Super Zoom in aperture priority mode at f3.6 and 1/1000th at ISO 200. The focal length was a 35mm equivalent 80mm.