Behind the Photo: Jackson Street Bridge, 10.10.18
What: City of Atlanta Skyline
Where: Jackson Street Bridge
When: Sunday June 12th 2016
Camera: Canon 5D Mark III, EF 35MM f/1.4L USM
This photo was taken two and a half years ago with DBaze and A$. We went on a 10-day tour of the lower east coast as a trip that summer. I remember I wanted a photo of the skyline of Atlanta real bad, so I searched for spots to take the best skyline photo. I came across Jackson Street Bridge and when I did an Instagram location search of Jackson Street Bridge, it was promptly added to our itinerary. I wanted to get a sunset photo, so we had to plan our activities that day accordingly. According to my daily journal, that day I woke up and took a shower. I looked over at DBaze and told him that he wanted to be me so bad. We went to Holeman and Finch and ate the best burger I’ve had in my life. I saw Holeman and Finch a few years earlier on a food documentary on Netflix, and one of the details they mentioned was they said Pharrell ate there once, so you know I had to go. After, we went to an outlet mall outside of Marietta. I bought some Italia Puma shorts, and I remember it being scorching hot out as we were strolling. Next, we hit up the botanical gardens, but we got there a little late for Sunday and decided it wasn’t worth it to pay to get into a place we couldn’t explore in full due to time constraints. To kill some time, we hung out at Centennial park downtown. While we were hanging, Darius and I tried to get up with Jhismael, a friend we had made on the brigade to Panama earlier that year. Turns out he was with his uncle in Atlanta. It fell through because of logistics, but it worked out because the sun was beginning to set on the city.
We made our way to Jackson Street Bridge. There is no official parking, so we found a spot on the side of an adjacent road. Walking up to the bridge, I noticed I forgot the tripod in the car. I told my brothers I’d catch up with them as I went back to retrieve the tripod. Once there, there was a white dude in the dead middle of the bridge. He was taking a time lapse. We spoke for a few minutes and he asked what I was shooting with. I told him an MK III. He went on to also inquire about my silicon case. There were families and others walking to take pics of the city as well. Most on their cellphones, a few with DSLRs. Conveniently, the guy taking the time lapse gave me his spot when he left, and I began taking long exposures of the city. I didn’t take too many bulb exposures at the time, matter of fact, I still don’t, but I took several of them over many minutes. While editing, I noticed there was a lot, and I mean A LOT, of noise and black clipping in the photos. I tried noise reduction and other means to get my resolution clean again, but to no avail. The final product is the photo above. It stands as a memory with my boys and signifies my creative time stamp on Atlanta via the Jackson Street Bridge. We went on to eat Zaxby’s and get Krispy Kreme down the road immediately after. I snapped all the hoes I was talking to at the time a video of my foot out the window as we pulled onto the highway attempting to convince them how good my life was without them.
Because at the time, it was.