Confluence Park

Author's Comments

The bridge is the photograph. I did not understand this the first few times I came here. I was looking for a single clean view of the skyline and growing frustrated that the park kept refusing to give me one. Then one evening in late June I climbed the pedestrian bridge twenty minutes after sunset, and the city assembled itself in front of me in a way it had not from the ground. Blue hour is when Confluence Park earns its name. The two waters come together below you, the buildings downtown go to silhouette and then to lit geometry, and the river holds enough of the sky to double everything. A long exposure smooths the current into something closer to mercury. The kayakers who give the place its summer energy are mostly off the water by then, which is fine. They belong to a different photograph, an earlier one, made in afternoon light with a faster shutter. I prefer September here. The cottonwoods along the Platte begin to turn, the air loses its summer haze, and the skyline reads cleaner against the sky. Bring a tripod. Bring more patience than you think you need, because the light shifts quickly in those minutes after the sun is gone and the best frame is usually not the first one you make. It is the one ten minutes later, when the windows in the buildings have come on and the sky has gone a deeper blue than seems quite real.

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