Bridge of the Gods

Author's Comments

The bridge is not beautiful in the conventional sense. It is industrial, gray, all rivets and trusses, and that is exactly what makes it photograph well at the right hour. Steel against the Columbia at blue hour does something that steel against a blue sky at noon never will. The structure goes silhouette, the river goes pewter, and the lights along the span come up slowly as the western sky drops through its last colors behind Table Mountain. I work from Thunder Island most evenings. The pedestrian bridge gets you out over the water with a clean line back toward the span, and a long exposure at twenty or thirty seconds smooths the Columbia into something closer to mercury. The cantilever holds its shape against the softened water and the photograph becomes about contrast - the rigid geometry of the bridge against the river it has been crossing since 1926. Marine Park gives you the wider context. From there the bridge is smaller in the frame and the gorge opens up around it, the Washington hills rising on the far bank, the whole landscape doing the work. I prefer this angle in early fall when the light comes in low from the west and rakes across the water before the sun drops behind the ridge. If you time it for a Friday or Saturday in summer you will likely watch a thru-hiker walk across with a pack on, headed north into Washington with eight hundred miles still ahead of them. That is not the photograph I came for, but it is the photograph I have ended up keeping more than once.

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