Brenda and I invited Tom and Marguerite out for an early morning boat ride. Tom and Marguerite met us at 8:30 and we decided to skip the boat due to strong winds that could lead to heavy seas. I suggested we go out and see how the seas were, but everyone else knew better and persuaded me to try again on Sunday. While we were all sitting on the porch, we started discussing the next bridge to shoot and how I wanted to do a ‘reconnaissance mission’ for the recon-mission. Brenda thought I was out of my mind, but my trusty photography friend Tom completely understood. I wanted to know what equipment I would need to assist taking the shot and be prepared with the equipment when we did the recon-mission.

After a quick change into our hiking gear and photo bag packed (with various tools including gaffers tape), we started out on our recon-recon mission. We were headed for Little Harbor Brook Bridge with a stop-over at Cliffside Bridge to see what was involved in shooting that bridge – heck, it was on the way!

We spent a fair bit of time at Cliffside Bridge and finally settled on a shooting location, best way down to the bridge, lighting locations and some ideas about safety concerns. Here’s the shot from the location.We wanted to be sure and include the weep hole and the cliff under the bridge in the picture.

We continued to Little harbor Brook Bridge, keeping in mind our ‘hard-turn-around-time’ of 11:50. After looking at some pictures online, I knew what shot I envisioned. I was hoping for a high shoot at an angle to capture both walls with the ends offset. To get that shot my tripod needed to be higher. I broke out the gaffers tape and proceeded to tape our Leki hiking sticks to the tripod legs. It worked as a proof of concept and the image is very close to what I envisioned. After reviewing the image and the scene in front of us, we identified a number of locations requiring lighting. Though this is a small bridge, there are some complex lighting challenges. As a bonus the date stone is visible too.

We took the Asticou Trail back, which turned out to be a nice hike and quicker than the carriage road. We realized that in the future, maybe we could recon two bridges in one day and we didn’t have to do it during dusk, now that we understand how to light a bridge.