25 de Abril Bridge

As mentioned before, my luck with the weather during my trip to Portugal was really bad. Out of the six and a half days I spent there, it rained for more than three and a half. And on one of the sunny days, there was a St. Patrick’s Day parade, so the city was full of people. Not exactly great conditions for photography.

Still, going out early in the morning and visiting less populated spots worked, as always.

One of those spots was the 25 de Abril Bridge (25th of April Bridge). And no, this is not the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, even though they look quite similar. Based on what I’ve read, both bridges were built by the same company, which explains the resemblance.

Since I like bridge photos, I took quite a few here, as you’ll see. For this one, I mostly used a single exposure for most of the image, with three additional exposures used just to tone down the brightness of the Jesus statue in the background. Although it still wasn’t quite enough.

Green lights all the way at the Arch of Rua Augusta

Let’s start with one right from the center, at the Arch of Rua Augusta. I wasn’t staying that far away, so I went there for the morning blue hour. As you can see, it had been raining just a few minutes before, leaving everything wet but also nicely reflective.

For this shot, I decided to do a vertorama with the 17mm TS-E lens so I could capture both the crossing and the whole arch. I really liked how it looked with all the green lights, and with a bit of timing, I managed to capture them even with the long exposure I needed. There were, of course, many tram line cables visible in this shot, but after some work in Photoshop, the image came out nice and clean.