Licking River Bridge Demo

Hello world

This morning I took my experimental photography setup (named Jason) downtown to record the demolition of the Licking River bridge. I didn’t even know this was happening until midnight last night. My friend texted me and asked me if I was going, and instead of staying up until 4am like I did the last two nights I decided to be responsible and knock myself out to get there on time with him. We got to our spot on the bridge at around 9:30 which concerned me because The fastest I can setup my camera is around 20 minuets and I have to take extra precautions due to the sleet that was falling. I ended up finishing my focusing at 9:56 giving me barely 7 minuets to set my aperture carefully and finish dialing in my exposure settings. For this shot I used my 642-842nm filter, 135mm f/2 lens, 50 ms exposures, 0 gain (my camera’s “iso”), and a sensor crop of 5736x3198 pixels. As the hour turned and the detonation was imminent everyone was still and quiet. Suddenly we see dust spread out from every surface of the bridge violently and the whole structure falls silently into the water. It felt like time had frozen. After what felt like a minuet but was really only about 3 seconds we felt the shockwave and it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. It sort of felt like getting hit with a very short gust of wind and sounded insanely deep.

Nothing but plastic wrap and a dream

I realized almost as soon as getting my camera setup that the bridge was shaking and my camera really doesn’t handle movement well at all. So weather I got a good shot or just enjoyed watching my first explosive demolition would be completely up to chance. I was satisfied at how well I was able to manage the weather and happy to see the bridge wasn’t too crowded. I had high hopes that I’d get a lucky shot but with my camera only able to turn out 1 frame per second even after cropping the sensor to make the files smaller I would have to get very lucky. Once I got home and took a 4 hour nap on accident I reviewed the data and found that as expected my camera only got two shots of the bridge falling. One was shortly after the charges went off and was blury and one was right as the bridge hit the water and was acceptably sharp.

The best shot I got. I was extremely lucky to catch the water splash like this

Shakey but still nice shot from right after the boom

A shot with my 15 pro max’s telephoto lens taken just before I left

If I were able to do this again I would definitely have wanted to get closer to be on solid land and use my 24mm lens. I also really want to learn how to get more control over my camera’s trigger, but I have enough to work on for this camera before I can even start thinking about tackling that. Overall this was a great experience and definitely worth the trouble of lugging around so much gear.

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