Here's to lost opportunities

Sometime ago I was introduced by a very good friend of mine, Ana, to her husband who works for National Geographic Portugal. We wanted to meet for quite some time, and the opportunity presented itself over a japanese dinner in one of my favorite japanese restaurants in Lisbon.

While eating delicious sushi and sashimi, he told me that the magazine was looking for some photos of Lisbon for an article about light pollution. I did not have any good photos for the article but I told him I would try to come up with some. Now this was not an easy task. I am not a professional photographer and I normally come out of work late, so I don't really have much time after work to go and photograph. The only time I had were weekends but I only had one weekend to do it because he needed the photos in the following two weeks.

To add up to my bad luck, in the saturday I went out to photograph it rained a lot and some of the main arteries in Lisbon had no traffic at all. The ideas I had about shooting light trails from cars passing by in the city went literally down the drain. I had to come up with other ideas so I remembered going to the other side of the river, to the Christ Redeemer sanctuary. We can get a pretty good view of the city from there and we have the added benefit of framing the bridge as well. No luck once again. The sanctuary closed at 6pm and at that time it was not dark enough yet for the city to have any lights.

Yet my trip to the sanctuary showed me the city in a different perspective. I had only been there when I was a kid and I barely rememberd the view. I returned there two weeks later, not in time for the photo to be in the National Geographic article, but the hour had changed from daylight savings time and at 6pm it was dark enough to have a great show of lights from the city, so I started snapping away. This is one of the shots I liked best, although it's a rather unusual composition. The statue of Christ the Redeemer had already been decorated with some lights for Christmas, and I ended up putting those lights on the top of the frame, making it look like that there was raining light from the sky into the city.

I may have lost an opportunity to finally have a photo published but I ended up discovering a great spot to look at my city in a different way...