Shining A Light

Sometimes you get roadblocks thrown at you when you have a plan to take a certain kind of photograph.  As you may have noticed, it's sunset season and I have been spending lots of time near the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal as the sun sets right next to it at this time of the year.  One of the fun features of the bridge is that there is a walking path that goes under the deck of the bridge and allows you access to the walking path on either side.  However, for some reason the door on this particular evening was locked, preventing me from being able to cross to the side I wanted to be on.  Since I didn't have the time to drive back to the other side and then walk back to the spot, I decided to stay where I was and hope for the best.  Thankfully, fortune was kind of smiling on me.  As it just so happened, the sun ended up going down right next to the bicycle path that is next to the superstructure of the span.  As a result, I had a nice clear shot of the sun, used a small aperture to get a star effect and underexposed the shot to put the bridge in a silhouette against the more colourful sky.  The photograph was taken at f/16, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 30mm.  As the Rolling Stones once sang, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.  It ended up being good enough to appear in the pages of the La Presse+ paper as well.  Just goes to show, a locked door doesn't always mean a lost opportunity.