09/18/18 Sunset from the Broadway Bridge Little Rock Arkansas–Featured Arkansas Photography

Sunset scene from the Broadway Bridge–Little Rock Arkansas

Taken with a Nikon D850 and 19mm PC-E lens, 2 12mm shifts from center.  

The new Broadway Bridge over the Arkansas River in Little Rock/North Little Rock, is a brand new bridge, just finished earlier this year.  The construction is very applying to the photographic eye.  I have been trying to figure out where to get the sunset, feature the bridge and the skyline of Little Rock for a while now.  For this shot I was on the North Little Rock side of the river and waited until the sun was right on the horizon.  To get the sun in the shot, requires you to move too much to the right and thus loose the skyline.   During the peak winter solstice, you might be able to get the sun into the frame as it will have moved to the left as far as it’s going to.

For this shot I used a Nikon D850 and 19mm PC-E lens.  Ideally the best lens to frame the shot would have been a 24mm to 35mm, but Nikon’s 24mm PC-E is very weak on the corners before shifting and once shifted IMO is pretty worthless.  Nikon doesn’t make a 35mm PC-E and the 45mm would have been too much lens.  The 19mm is tack sharp even with a 12mm shift.  You need to watch your framing and check the focus as the ideal focus spot will shift as you shift the lens.  There is a bit of vignetting, but that can be corrected in post.  It would be nice if LR would get a lens profile done for the 19mm, but so far there is not one.  Typical again for Adobe as the 19mm has been out now for over a year.

I used Lightroom to create the panorama, and only used the left and right shifts as the center just provided the same details.  Lightroom still has trouble blending the exposure on this type of shot and tends to cut a demarcation line right down the middle of the frame.  You can export the same 2 files to Photoshop CC and get a much better blend, but Photoshop CC doesn’t have the boundary warp option, which I use all the time.  And you are no longer working on a dng/raw file instead the panorama image is converted to a tif once the panorama process is complete.

This image was shot at the base ISO of the D850 of 64 which is very clean even when pushed.  Since there was no wind the evening this shot was taken I was able to get by with longer exposure times.

Written for www.photosofarkansas.com by Paul Caldwell, please ask permission before using any part of this article in a different publication.