Down By The River

At the photojournalism workshop in Maysville, Kentucky last month, they 'strongly encouraged' us to get out and shoot what they called 'features' in addition to the story we'd each been assigned. Features are shots that stand on their own, without much need for captions and such.

We were sleep deprived and stressed from trying to make a story happen in just a few days, so going out to shoot extras on the little bit of spare time you could snag didn't seem particularly appealing. By the third night of the workshop the instructors were starting to get a little frantic about features, seems nobody had been doing much feature hunting.

They added an extra 200 frames to our shot limit and made some pointed comments about features, so after we called it a night in the wee hours of the morning I went wandering around Maysville doing a little feature hunting. Eventually made it down to the banks of the Ohio River to shoot the Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge.

The bridge connecting the city to Aberdeen, Ohio had seemed a little on the sketchy side when I'd been walking on it, and comments by the locals did nothing to dissuade that notion. Still, it was an iconic sight for Maysville and really stood out at night. Shot it every way I could think of, went and got my nightly three and a half hours of sleep, then came back to see what the sunrise would bring.

Fog. Rivers and mornings and fog just go together for some reason. Had to leave to meet up with my story at 0730, missed getting to see the sun finally poke through the fog but still managed to get some shots I liked. Don't think they were the features the instructors were looking for but that's their problem. Here in Louisville, we have a dense fog advisory until 1100 tomorrow, so I'm going to get some shuteye and venture down to the river in the morning.