It was late spring or early summer of 2013, one of my first visits to Campbell’s Covered Bridge near Landrum, South Carolina. On a beautiful blue-sky day with a few wispy clouds, the sun had just begun to peek over the tree-lined hill behind me, dappled light caressing my subject.
Back then I was still using my wide-angle lens, Nikon 16 mm to 35 mm, on my Nikon D600 full frame camera, a camera that eventually had to be replaced due to a defective design. Since my primary interest was in landscapes, I thought the only logical way to capture a landscape scene was with a wide-angle lens. As time went by, I became less enamored with wide-angle shots and began to prefer using a 70 mm to 200 mm lens most of the time.
But in this shot, 16 mm came in quite handy. My goal was to capture the bridge and all the fencing directly in front of it. I wanted to do it while being as close to the bridge as possible.
I tried shooting from several positions in front of the bridge. None of them looked right to me. In fact, they all showed the large informational sign on the other side of the bridge. Having that sign in the photograph spoiled it for me. Then I got the idea of going to the left edge of the little gravel road that led up to the bridge. Standing there, I took a shot. I didn’t like it.
I couldn’t see the sign, but the photo just didn’t look right. Then I got the even better idea of sitting down right next to the left fence post in the foreground of the photograph. I had been crunching around in the gravel for several minutes by then. But I did not realize how cold it was until I sat down in it.
I looked through the viewfinder and could not see the end of the fence on the right side. I tried to get up to reposition myself and found that quite difficult. So I used my feet to push myself back until I saw all the fencing inside the viewfinder. I only had to slide back about a foot or two, but I must tell you, that was a weird sensation, feeling cold hard gravel going past my old backside.
There are hundreds of photos of this bridge online, and I have seen most of them. So far, I have not seen one from this exact perspective.
There I was on that cold hard gravel. It was time to get up. I slipped my camera strap over my head and gently laid the camera beside me. The thought of old knees on gravel made me begin to wonder if sitting there to get that shot was a good idea after all. Trying to push myself up was also quite uncomfortable for my old hands, those craggy gray pebbles digging into my palms. I began to have feelings akin to being trapped inside something, not a real-life experience for me, just one of those real bad dreams I sometimes wake up from and find it hard to shake the feeling.
Here is what I did: mostly using my legs and feet, I slowly and cautiously slid my old butt forward until I could reach the fence post nearest to me. I grabbed it and, with a quiet groan or two, I painstakingly pulled myself up, relieving the panic that had begun to build up inside me. It even made me chuckle when I remembered the line from an old advertisement for a medical alert device: I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
Paraphrased for me, it would’ve said, “I sat down on cold hard gravel just to get a photograph and it looks like I’m gonna be here for a while.”