This photo came about during a trip into Washington, DC, to view the cherry blossoms early one spring. My brother and I had travelled into DC many times over the years viewing and photographing cherry blossoms, and so for this trip we decided to look for cherry blossoms in an area we’d yet to explore, East Potomac Park. The park is located on a finger of land surrounded by the Potomac River and the Washington Channel, and is just outside the typical circuit route popular with most cherry blossom viewers.

You have to pass under a couple bridges to get to the majority of the park, and one of those is the Francis Case Memorial Bridge, over which 395 spans from Virginia into DC. I often find bridges, and particularly their underside, fascinating, and this one was no different. So I paused briefly and composed some photographs before moving on to the rest of the park and the cherry blossoms.

I like the symmetry you often find with bridges. And with this one I was drawn to the slightly lit undersides of the metal beams, lit from sunlight reflected from the water below. I did lighten them further in post-processing to help bring out some of what I’d been drawn to, the light and shadow, the patterns of the parallel lines occasionally crossed by the horizontal supports. And I liked the variety of tones to the stones of the support columns.

A lesson that was reinforced this day is that even when you go out with a specific goal in mind, such as photographing cherry blossoms, always keep your eyes open to other possibilities. You never know what you may find.

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