Category: Bridge Project

New updates to the Ruinism website

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My awesome web designer, Sean Thompson and I have recently revamped the entire Portfolio section of this website.  Check it out and I would love to hear any feedback.

The first section is titled Ruinism. This is an ongoing project of mine that started with my love for mythology and visiting ancient ruins. Over the years I’ve incorporated modern ruins as I try to capture the timelessness and spirit of the place. Ghosts and nudes will sometimes be seen in these spaces and add a sense of beauty to the decay.

All images are part of a bigger storyboard that is often unknown.
The theme Exposures is based on capturing a mysterious moment in that bigger story. These images will often make you ask, “What is it?” “What just happened?” or “What will happen?”

Two new themes have also been added, Time Exposed and The Bridge Project.
Time Exposed is a collection of my photographs that focuses on the passing of time around a single exposure. Taken mainly at night or with a pinhole camera during the day, I seek to focus on the capture of time itself and the unseen moments that happen between the seconds, minutes and hours of time exposed.

The Bridge Project is my most recent ongoing theme. Bridges are modern marvels.
These solid structures often will lead you over a dangerous chasm of water or rocks. I try to heighten that dichotomy of order and chaos in each image. Some bridges are famous but most others are simply utilitarian, however each has a story to tell.

The image above is titled the Cylon bridge.  It is the Roosevelt Lake Bridge or sometimes referred to the Roosevelt Dam Bridge because it replaced traffic that was driving over the Roosevelt Dam in 1990.  This image has quickly become one of my favorite images and is a nice long exposure of 10 minutes shooting due north.  Click on the image to enlarge it as well as see the other exposure details.  Nancy and I stumbled across this bridge while we were driving on the Historic Route 88 in Arizona.  We had just visited the Hoover Dam a week before and when I saw there was another Dam along this road, well we realized we had committed to a Dam Tour.
Sorry.

I later found out that the The Roosevelt Dam Bridge spans 1,080 feet across Roosevelt Lake and is the longest two-lane, single span, steel arch bridge in North America.  The original dam-top roadway was designed to allow two Model-T Fords to pass abreast, but today’s recreational vehicles and full-size automobiles are too wide to permit two-way traffic.
This info and more can be found here.
I’ve also included an image of the Roosevelt Dam so we can see the entire picture.  I consider myself a manscape photographer,  I like to incorporate man made structures with the landscape.

What else did you think I meant?

Happy 127th Birthday Brooklyn Bridge!

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On this night 127 years ago, 14 tons of fireworks, more than 10 thousand pieces, were set off from the Brooklyn Bridge in an outstanding display of pyrotechnics that lasted an hour.  Hundreds of thousands of spectators gathered along the shores of Manhattan and Brooklyn to witness the biggest celebration the cities had ever experienced.

It was the first bridge to cross the strong and swift East River.  And for a time it was known as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” as it towered far above any other building in New York.  It cost just one cent to walk along the Great Bridge’s Promenade and later that year had two streetcars that would carry almost 10 million people across in their first year of service.

The Brooklyn Bridge was officially opened on May 24th 1883.  It was deemed an official holiday known as “The People’s Day” and the president of the United States,  Chester A. Arthur, was one of the first to walk across with the Governor of NY and soon to be next president, Grover Cleveland.
They walked over on, still to this day, the only elevated promenade on a bridge.
150,300 people crossed that first day the New York Brooklyn Bridge was open to the public.

If you have never walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, you are missing one of the most amazing views and feelings a human can have.  I am lucky to bike over this Great Bridge on a weekly basis.  It is like being on the top of the world.  You can see the Statue of Liberty to the left and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to your right.  The cityscapes surround you and the cars whiz by without notice below.  You have an unobstructed view of the world, except for the cables which safely envelope you as well as hold the 6,620 tons of weight that is suspended over the East River.

Below is a direct quote by David McCullough, who wrote The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, from Ken Burns America Collection – Brooklyn Bridge:

I feel that the bridge makes one feel better about being alive.
I think it makes you glad that you are part of the human community.
That you are part of a species that could create such a structure.

We are builders and we when see something that we built well, our hats are off!
We stand there and say, “Isn’t it marvelous?”
But isn’t it marvelous that it was built by people, people like you and I.
People like we would like to be, at least.
And brave, courage, the tenacity of those people, the confidence.

All of those are… they sound like platitudes
But they are truths, they are simple truths.
But some truths need repeating generation after generation after generation.
And the Brooklyn Bridge continues to repeat truths that we need to remember.

I highly recommend taking a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge sometime soon…