Lens Artists Challenge #413: Bridges

Lens Artists Challenge #413: Bridges

This week it's Beth's turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is 'Bridges' (https://wanderingdawgs.com/2026/09/12/lens-artists-photo-challenge-413-bridges/). It's a simple Challenge this week, 'to show us your favorite bridge images. You can feature any kind of bridge: natural bridges, foot bridges, swinging bridges, highway bridges, stone bridges, railroad bridges, or any other kind of bridge you can think of'.

What a great subject for the Challenge. I love bridges, and there are some great bridges in Portugal. Like the Ponte (bridge) 25 de Abril in Lisbon. Spanning the river Tejo, this always reminds me of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. There's also the new bridge over the Tejo, the Ponte Vasco Da Gama. Although I’ve been over it many times, I've never actually managed to get a photograph of it.

Anyways, today the Challenge is to look at the many bridges in the city of Aveiro. Famous in Portugal for its canals (Aveiro is known as the 'Venice of Portugal', which always made me wonder, is Venice known locally as the 'Aveiro of Italy'?), there are many bridges that span them. Some are new, but there are still a couple of the older bridges remaining, and some that I was unaware of until I went out the other day.

Anyone who has pottered around this blog might have noticed that my favourite camera of the moment is the Ilford Pixie 35-II, with its amazing radial blur. I've been trying to recreate this effect digitally using an old Canon EOS 10D DSLR and the Lensbaby Muse, and I reckoned that this combination  would be the perfect selection for a wander around the city. The thing with the Lensbaby Muse is that it's a real challenge to focus. Instead of twisting the lens to achieve focus, with the Muse you have to push and pull a flexible plastic lens barrel. I think I achieved focus most of the time, but it was pretty hit and miss.

I managed to make images from some of my favourite bridges, and also discovered a couple of new ones. The Lensbaby has a 50mm focal length on full-frame cameras, so with the APS-C sensor of the Canon EOS 10D this is equivalent to about 75mm. As a result, this meant that in some cases, instead of getting a view of the whole bridge many images were presented in close-up. But in the event, I quite liked this abstract approach. 

Also, for me the blur effect of the Lensbaby is much more ... interesting ... in black and white. However, the old Canon EOS 10D DSLR that I was doing doesn't have the ability to daily in monochrome mode, so I ended up converting some of the images to black and white in post. Also, the EOS 10D weighs an absolute tonne, especially with the battery pack that it came with, so between the weight and holding the camera so I could 'focus' the Muse properly it was certainly a fun challenge.

If you're interested, I’ve posted the whole series in an album on my Photo Web Cloud (formerly Joomeo) (https://public.photowebcloud.fr/albums/6aae5587b1c27) if you want to see the rest of the images. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the following week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

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