The Story Behind the Photo

March 2023: Reflection

Mirrored Bridges, by Shannon Milner

A of couple weeks before the “Reflections” club meeting, I had been trying to think of what and where to take reflection images.  There weren’t any water puddles where I wanted them to reflect something I felt inspired to photograph, so I went to Ikea and bought some mirrors. I knew that these 2 bridges were side by side at a park, a bike pathway not too far from where I live. I thought they might work for this reflection. I drove over to this location in Kent,Wa. It was late afternoon on a mostly sunny day. To take the picture I am looking south, so the sun is to my right (west), about 2 hours before sun down.

For this image I used a 5x7 inch mirror. I held it with my left hand trying to keep my fingers out of the image.  I held my Sony A7RIV camera with my wide angle 16-35 lens in my right hand.

The settings were : F2.8, 1/4000, ISO 100, 24mm and hand held.

I angled the mirror to reflect the 2 bridges at a angle that the camera could see and took about 5 different images. When I looked at them later I decided that this 1 image was the best reflection.

Once I was back home I loaded the photos onto my tablet and chose the best of the 5 I took.  I then used Snapseed, a free photo editing app, to do a few minor edits. I chose three of the app’s presets in my edit:

1. Push-to change to black and white

2. Silhouette- to increase the contrast

3. Morning-to add the color gradient

I rarely do any editing to my photos so even though I pay for adobe photoshop and Lightroom I rarely use it. Instead I tend to use Snapseed for those quick minimal edits. I really liked the original image I took, What I had as an image in my mind and what I was able to take/make as an image turned out better than I thought it would. Once I edited the image to the final result I was excited with how it looked and really liked the result.