Bridgeport Reflections [iPhone]
August 26, 2011 • Bridgeport, California
(click in the image to see a larger version)
"It is not what you look at that maters, it's what you see."
– Henry David Thoreau
Yesterday afternoon was all about cooling off at the river, family time, swimming, watching fish under the water, receiving an invigorating river rapid massage while braced in a narrow channel, and a chance encounter that made me appreciate seeing the world with a photographer's eye. But more on that epiphany in a bit.
With a picnic lunch in the cooler, my wife and I picked up our daughter from school at midday and headed straight for our usual swimming spot at Bridgeport (the one in Nevada County, not the one in Mono County). It's a great place to go swimming in the summer, with beautiful clear water, deep rock-lined pools, gentle "rapids", and quiet shallow areas for the little ones. It’s also a great place to go because when I am there in the water, I find it nearly impossible to be distracted by thoughts of work and deadlines. They just can’t get a grip on my mind in that environment, so it’s a wonderful place to unplug for a while and just drift along. Normally we can start swimming there by July 4th, but the record snow levels in the Sierras this winter meant extra high, cold, and fast waters well into July and our first day at the river this year was not until August 1st.
There is no town at Bridgeport, just this bridge and a small visitor center, which is part of the South Yuba River State park (its status is still uncertain with possible closure looming due to state budget cuts). It was built in 1862 and at 251 feet in length along its ridge top it is the longest single span wooden covered bridge in the United States. It is beautifully made with a graceful arch that is visible on both the inside and outside of the structure.
I left my DSLR at home because I just didn't feel like lugging it. The only camera I had was my iPhone 4. But, I was photographically prepared in other ways and I brought along my river tripod, a small aluminum model that I frequently set up in the water. It’s a bit lightweight for my big camera, but it works great for my wooden pinhole camera and the iPhone. For this shot I used a wooden tripod mount for the iPhone that I cobbled together myself using materials that cost me about two dollars. It's a prototype and total quickie hack job that’s a bit funky looking, but it works great, which is all I care about. With it the phone can be mounted both vertically and horizontally. The tripod was necessary for this scene because I was making iPhone HDR images. The image above was one part of a two-exposure HDR sequence but for this photo I ended up using only one shot. In terms of post-capture processing there’s not much; just some minor lightening of the lower half in Filterstorm 3 and the addition of the frame in Nik Snapseed.
The tripod was set up in the shallows of a still area near the shore and was down quite low near the surface of the water, so I could get a nice reflection of the bridge (TIP: When you're shooting reflections, the lower you get, the closer the reflection will be to the object that is casting the reflection; this approach allows for tighter compositions and less empty space between the object and its reflection). I suppose that the sight of someone crouching in the water with an iPhone on a tripod might look a bit curious to some and after a while a man slowly approached me, obviously quite interested in my activities.
"Hi there", he greeted me. " Whatcha doing?"
"Making a photograph of the bridge", I replied, but I could tell that this did not entirely satisfy him.
"Is that a phone camera?"
I nodded.
He studied my setup for a few seconds. "Why do you have it on that tripod?"
“Well, for the type of picture that I am making it works best if the camera is not moving".
"But why are you down so low?"
If you were standing up, as he was, you would not see any reflection of the bridge in the water that was immediately in front of us. I explained that by getting down very low, almost to the surface of the water, I could get a composition of the bridge and also a really nice reflection of the bridge. He crouched down low so he could see what I meant. That's when he had his epiphany.
"Wow! That's really cool!" His face lit up and he smiled. Then he bent down to look again, gazing intently at it like it was a magic pool that only revealed its secrets to a chosen few.
"Thanks for showing me!" he said. Then he called over to his wife and a few friends, "Hey guys, you should come check this out! There's a reflection of the bridge in the water!"
I finished taking my shots and moved farther out to photograph the moving water. It was as I was watching him and his companions checking out the newfound visual discovery of the bridge reflection that I had my epiphany. Well, not really an epiphany, in the true sense of the word, because I already knew this, but it was a reminder.
It made me think of the quote by Henry David Thoreau that I referenced at the beginning of this post: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see”. How very true this is! The man and I were both looking at the same thing, but we were seeing them differently. As a photographer, I know to look for reflections because they can make for very interesting images, and this was a reflection I had seen many times before. But for him it was something new and exciting and it only took a slight adjustment of his angle of view for him to see so much more. That’s a good thing to remember, because I think we can all benefit now and then from adjusting our angle of view to see what else there is to be seen, or how a different view can change our perception of what we see. It works for photography and pretty much everything else, too.
******
I'm off to Maine in a week to teach two back-to-back classes at the Maine Media Workshops. There's still some room in each one, so it you or anyone you know might be interested, see the image links above in the right column.
A view of the bridge in late winter. The swimming area is just on the other side of the bridge (click in the image to see it larger).