Tower Bridge

This photo was take for West Sacramento's 15 days in May, and took 1st in the college

photography category.....

The nice combination of artificial and natural light is what makes this work for me. Very good.

Wonderful composition and even more wonderful light. You did very well with this shot.

 

Is the sign flash filled or is all the light natural?

Very good use of fisheye - great colours too. I like the warped effect, it says something of the straight lines we impose upon nature, perhaps it is conveying a sense of the ephemeral.

When I was young, I saved a man's life on this very bridge.

 

This was the main east-west bridge for traffic to Reno before I-80 went through, and as I drove into Sacramento from the Bay Area on my way to my job at Associated Press in Reno in 1969-70 on this bridge on the left side eastbound I spied a grizzled, bearded man clutching his throat, bleeding all over his clothes and the bridge deck.

 

No one stopped, even though it was a main highway and very busy, all in the daytime. There was no question that the man was in grave trouble.

 

The bleeding man didn't want to stop either, even though his throat had been slit; he was ambulatory, but he kept trying to sit down and was about to sit down and 'bleed out'.

 

His jugular 'vein' had not been slit and he was slowly bleeding to death.

 

I summoned an ambulance after walking him to the other side (he had sat down on the walkway but wouldn't stay put on the bridge, foreground --right, here, possibly left in my circumstance), probably to die in front of traffic, and wanted to look for a buiding to crawl into, which surely would have been the kiss of death.)

 

He was whisked away to a hospital, and I never heard anything more of it; he weakly explained to me (because his windpipe worked OK), that he had been in a camp for bums and a man had taken offense and 'slit my throat', he knew he was going to die, but didn't think anybody cared.

 

It seems nobody did.

 

Except me.

 

West Sacramento is still the 'poor side of town'.

 

This is a fine exposure and an excellent photo.

 

Highly evocative for me in a way you could never have imagined.

 

John (Crosley)

(surprised at the wellspring of memories a photo can conjur up)