Soot(hing) Calatrava - a photo on Flickriver

            The Calatrava bridges are three bridges over the Hoofdvaart in the Dutch municipality of Haarlemmermeer, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. He was commissioned to design these in 1999. Calatrava designed three white cable-stayed bridges, each with a sloping steel pylon that (suppose to) has both an aesthetic and a constructive function - typical of the Calatrava's work.

Due to the string-like cables the bridges were given the names of the instruments as the Harp, the Zither and the Lute. Those names were chosen after a publicly organized competition by the municipality. The bridges were completed in 2003 and officially opened on July 1, 2004, by Queen Beatrix.

The Lute is a roundabout bridge (on Maria Tesselschadelaan) and has the shortest pylon (48 meters) of all three.  

There is a lot of criticism on the designed, as most always with work by Calatrava. The bridges are commonly considered to be too big for the rather narrow Hoofdvaart. The sense of scale is rather off. Secondly , it turned out that the pylon of the Lute also has no constructional function. It doesn’t support the 2 bridges in any way. Thirdly, the bridges seem to rust quite a lot. Resulting in a repairs and maintenance costs of up to 55+ million euros up to now (FYI: the initial construction costs: 22 million). Last but not least from a photographic stand point, the bridges are in close vicinity to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Next to the road traffic’s  emissions, the fine particle pollution by the arriving and especially departing aircraft, turned the crisp white colour in no time into a soot-like colour.

Technical stuff
The reason and inspiration why I started taking these kind of hyper long exposures is explained earlier in my stream. This is my genuine second attempt. Again a bridge, but that’s really a coincidence. I promise the next shot – already in the middle of post-production – will be no bridge ;-)

This is a single, tripod based, shot. Taken at 200ISO, f10 (due to the lead-in cabling), 134 seconds at 16 mils. I in total made four shots, but picked the first one…
Post-production was done with the help of Lightroom. I used several inverted radial filters, adjustment brushes, one graduated filter at the top and removed several very small white spots (of which I can’t determine the origin. At first I thought it was a problem with my sensor (being an APS-C X-Trans CMOS III). Ohhh NO!!! But saw the same problem in the X-T2’s. So, who has any thoughts on this??). Finally, I added some copyright signs (in PS). The latter is, alas, there to stay due to the fact that my photos were frequently copied. So, don't bother commenting on that.

Taken in: Holland / North Holland / Hoofddorp (show map)

Taken on: June 7, 2020

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Camera: Fujifilm X-E3 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Fujifilm X-E3
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 21.1 (Windows)
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