Liberty Here, Working Now

The title is meant as a pun that spans like the reflected bridge from Liberty Hall on the right to hardhats and roadworks to the left as seen through the office in the here and now.

The impossibility of a line of sight from Liberty Hall to Beckett Bridge was made real by reflections on an office pod by the river. An empty office with a hard hat resting beneath the distant sign of works. The wall of window was city filthy, the interior wall dirtier still. The scudding clouds were constantly changing the light. Why no vehicles, no people in such a busy city? But wait, there was someone walking behind me. She stopped to take in the Liffey split view to be permanently burned into my view of a ghosted office.

I took this photograph in 2019 by the the Samuel Beckett Bridge that spans the Liffey in Dublin. I had a new(ish) digital camera and an old(ish) manual lens and I had seen the elements of what I thought could be an interesting picture.

But I only had that one 35 mm lens which should have been ideal. It was mounted on a Fuji-X camera. Their sensors are smaller than a 35 mm film frame. Physics dictates that an image from such a sensor will be magnified by about 1.6 relative to the lens. This means the field of view is reduced and in simple terms, the 35 mm lens acts more like a 50. So either I’d have had to stand in the river or change lens in order to capture the shot I imagined. Or I could make a collage from multiple shots which is what the panorama method does. So I set the manual focus, selected f3.5 and chose 1/250s as the shutter speed for a digital triptych. The three images stitched together nicely to create a cityscape more grunge than pretty.

Not bad for a lens made in 1959 mounted with an adaptor made in 2019 on a camera made in 2018 snapped by someone made before any of these.