New England’s Many Covered Bridges are great subjects for Fine Art Photography
Nothing says you are in New England like looking out the car window and seeing a covered bridge crossing over a slow moving river. These timeless pieces of history make wonderful subjects for fine art photography, and this winter my wife and I spent a weekend up in New Hampshire visiting several of them. With over 175 covered bridges remaining in New England and a little careful planning we were able to easily photograph several in a single weekend!
The Albany Covered Bridge over the Swift River on the Kancamagus Highway is a great example of a New England covered bridge. Built in 1858 the bridge spans 120 feet, with a width of 20 feet. With great color in the red roof, and plenty of rocks and flowing water the scene offered a great deal of potential!
New England’s Albany Covered Bridge
As soon as I saw the bridge and the flowing water of the Swift River, I knew that in addition to the covered bridge itself, my composition needed to feature the water and the rocks as dominant design elements in the photograph. I used a wide angle lens and got down as low to the water as I safely could, and adjusted my position several times until I had the rocks, river and covered bridge in the location I wanted them to be.
When creating fine art photography, I am more interested in conveying a feeling in an image then I am in recording an exact copy of the scene that is presented to me. While I love to get very creative in the post processing of my images, my vision for this photograph was to keep the scene as natural looking as possible. I wanted to portray the landscape with the grey sky and the slightly subdued colors that one would expect to see on a cold winter New England day.
As I reviewed the photographs on the cameras LCD I realized that the range of the scene was just slightly more then my sensor could capture in a single image. To capture enough detail in the rocks, the exposure left the sky overexposed and I lost the slight whispy clouds. If I exposed for the sky alone, then the rocks were darker then I wanted them to be. I decided to take a few exposures that captured both the rocks and the sky, and manually blend them together. There are many different ways that I could have handled this landscape, but this seemed to be the best approach for me at the time.
I hope that you have enjoyed my photography of the Albany Covered Bridge. You can purchase high quality prints of many of my pieces of work in my fine art print gallery here on the site!