By the third week, the group had found its rhythm. People arrived knowing roughly what to expect — a walk, some technical discussion, a lot of standing in the dark trying to get the exposure right on something that didn’t want to cooperate. Kurilpa Bridge was the week’s subject, and it is a genuinely difficult location to photograph well.
The bridge is a tensegrity structure: a web of cables and struts that creates an impression of organised chaos overhead. At night, the lighting built into the structure turns it into something that reads as completely different from its daytime self. Photographing it requires you to make decisions about what you are actually photographing — the whole thing, or a detail; the structure, or the people on it; the bridge, or the city through it.
On long exposures: This was the session where several group members pushed into longer exposure territory properly for the first time. The challenge with Kurilpa Bridge at night is the relationship between the lit structure and the surrounding darkness. The camera wants to average those two things, which produces an image that is neither. You have to override it — expose for the highlights, let the shadows go dark, or vice versa, and commit to that decision.
On the commute: I photographed on the bus on the way there, which is something I almost never do. But there is a person holding a camera up to the window of a bus moving across the river, with buildings out of focus behind them, and that is an interesting image regardless of where you are going. The journey is always part of the work.
On group dynamics: By week three, people had sorted themselves into the enthusiastic and the uncertain, and the enthusiastic were now helping the uncertain. That transfer of knowledge between peers — not from instructor to student, but sideways between people at similar stages — is something formal photography education rarely produces. The community of it is the point.
On Kurilpa specifically: The sign at the entrance — “Kurilpa Bridge / Tidna Yadeni Kurilpa / Walk to South Brisbane” — is one of the best text photographs in Brisbane. The bilingual naming, the gold on black, the way a photographer in the background just happens to be smiling. I got that image almost by accident, walking past it, and it ended up being one of the better frames of the night.