Against The Grain #14884

The Story

Here is a small forest bridge in snow landscape, found back on snowy trails where not many had recently walked. It was barren and cold that day despite the sunshine and the birds were silent. The bridge calls you forward…come, go through, I’ll carry you…there’s another landscape with a meadow waiting for you around the bend out ahead. Tall thin trees line the way, sugar maple, walnut and dead ash with bark flecked by birds now absent.

Winter snow in a sunlit landscape is a wonderful opportunity to gather some great images and I certainly enjoy being out there. Most of the time I’ll photograph in color, but I chose black and white infrared for this forest bridge in snow. It was an interesting setting to shoot in black and white because of all the strong lines jutting several directions at once. They’d all be accented and pull the eye if I could keep from making more of a jumble out of it. I was hoping to have all the lines work around the subject of the bridge as they went left, right, and up and down. It seems to have mostly worked shooting in infrared.

The title Against the Grain comes from all those shadow lines a person would have to walk through in spite of them seeming to bar the way through. The path is actually clear, all you have to do is move forward and cross the span. Only your imagination would keep you from simply walking through, so never let it be you that stops you.

Location: near Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks