Breckenridge Historic Main Street

Author's Comments

The composition writes itself, which is both the gift and the trap of this street. Victorian facades in saturated reds and yellows and blues, the Tenmile Range stacked behind them like a backdrop someone painted in too literally, and a main street that runs more or less perpendicular to the peaks. Anyone with a phone makes a decent photograph here. The harder thing is making one that feels like yours. I come at blue hour in January, when the holiday lights are still up and the snow on the rooftops has not yet been shoveled into something tidier. The street goes quiet around five thirty. The shop windows turn warm against the cold blue of the sky, and for maybe twenty minutes the temperature of the light inside the buildings and the temperature of the light outside are in genuine conversation. That is the window. Wide lens for the street and the range together, longer lens to compress the facades into a flatter, more graphic frame, and something in between for the details that I always forget to shoot until I am back in the car wishing I had. Summer works too, but differently. The peaks lose their snow by July and the composition flattens. Fall is short and worth catching for the aspens on the slopes behind town. Winter is when the place fully cooperates. Get there before the dinner crowd. Stay through full dark if you can. The lights stay on long after the light goes.

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