Jackson Covered Bridge (Honeymoon Bridge)

Author's Comments

The bridge announces itself before you have parked. That particular red is hard to miss, and it is the first thing the eye locks onto in a village that otherwise reads in muted greens and grays and the white of clapboard. I have stood at the Ellis River below it in three of the four seasons and the bridge changes character with each one, but the architecture itself is most legible in late afternoon when the western light hits the portal straight on and the paddleford trusses inside catch a warmer color through the open ends. What I find myself studying is the relationship between the structure and what surrounds it. The bridge does not stand alone. It sits in a bowl of mountains, and from the right angle downstream you can compose the red of the siding against the layered ridges behind, with the cascades of the Ellis breaking up the foreground. It is a more complicated photograph than it first appears. The temptation is to shoot the bridge head-on and call it done. The better image is usually three-quarter, from the river, low enough that the rocks come into the frame. Winter strips it down to essentials. Snow on the roof, dark water, the red almost shocking against all that white. Fall is the postcard and worth doing once. Summer is the hardest, honestly. The greens crowd the composition and the bridge has to work to stand out. Come at golden hour. Walk down to the riverbed. Give the place forty minutes rather than ten.

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