By Jim Sizemore

March 20, 2010

To celebrate Spring my friend Mary and I headed to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. (Click images to enlarge.) Harper’s Ferry is about 60 miles west of Baltimore—a short and scenic drive, especially if you tend to get lost and have to take two-lane roads to avoid backtracking—which no self-respecting day-tripper would consider. After all, getting lost—assuming it isn’t overdone or dangerous—is part of the fun. Once at Harper’s Ferry, we drove through town and up to the graveyard overlooking the valley and the rivers. After hiking down to Jefferson Rock—so named for Thomas Jefferson who visited the spot in 1783—which is on part of the Appalachian Trail, we made a few pictures of the area and each other. That’s me atop Jefferson Rock, taken by Mary; and Mary below, taken by me—mutual muses.

I love the first photograph not because I’m in it (posing like Gary Cooper in “The Fountainhead”), but because Mary composed the image so beautifully. The shot is full-frame, simple shapes artfully arranged, the sky above, the boulders and hills below taking up most of the image, each odd shape with its own personality, each contributing to the overall design. Most of the time when someone sends me a snapshot I immediately want to crop it to give it more unity, make it stronger. But in this case I didn’t consider doing that. It was picture perfection. One way to better appreciate the composition is to reduce the image to lines only, as I’ve done to the right. Then we understand how Mary arranged the photographic elements so that no two areas are the same size or shape (variety = visual interest), and the focal point—the human figure—is off to one side rather than centered, the saturated blue sky acting as its frame.

Meanwhile, in photo three, to toot my horn, over Mary’s left shoulder there’s a partial view of what Thomas Jefferson would have viewed—including we happy day-trippers—had he been there last Saturday.

If you’ve never visited Jefferson Rock here’s a bit of what Wikipedia has to say about Harper’s Ferry. The National Historical Park is located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers in and around Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. The park includes land in Jefferson County, West Virginia; Washington County, Maryland and Loudoun County, Virginia. Managed by the National Park Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Originally designated as a National Monument in 1944, the park was declared a National Historical Park by Congress in 1963. The park includes the historic town of Harper’s Ferry, notable as a center of 19th century industry and as the scene of John Brown’s abolitionist uprising. Consisting of almost 4,000 acres, the land marks the site on which Thomas Jefferson said, after visiting the area in 1783, “The passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature.”

Copyright © 2010 Mary Azrael and Jim Sizemore.