Over­look­ing Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

I’m over­look­ing Wash­ing­ton, D.C. from the dome of the Library of Con­gress with this shot. Not many peo­ple get up here. My Con­gres­sional Representative’s office worked it out for me, though. The tim­ing was the tricky part. As a pho­tog­ra­pher, I would asked if we could sched­ule the visit at sun­set. It turns out that the only way to get up here as an ordi­nary schmuck is if you’re accom­pa­nied by a mem­ber of Con­gress or the Chief of Staff for that mem­ber. Need­less to say, that put an entirely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the time of the visit and we got up there in the after­noon sunlight.

No mat­ter, I was still thrilled. The trip up to the dome is through a creepy old metal stair­case. It has an incline more like a lad­der than your typ­i­cal stair­case. In fact, they ques­tioned me about my health before grant­ing my request. Let’s face it, this is not the kind of place where they want to res­cue some­one who gets over­come by phys­i­cal stress. You need to be healthy enough to make it up and back down under your own power. They do a good job of enforc­ing this rule, as I saw very few skele­tons along the way.

Over­look­ing Wash­ing­ton, D.C. is both exhil­a­rat­ing and slightly dis­ap­point­ing. As you exit the dome and step out to the bal­cony sur­round­ing it, you’re imme­di­ately pre­sented with the view in this image just slightly to your right. You can walk around the dome and see all over the city. Then you take a pic­ture of this view, because the rest of the town is pretty damn dull to see. Non-​descript build­ings, mostly brown, could be in any city.

That’s not to say I didn’t take pho­tos of those ugly build­ings, any­way. A few smoke­stacks here, some old brick build­ings there, and office build­ings on the other side. The President’s heli­copter was fly­ing off in the dis­tance, too, right above some con­struc­tion cranes.

This city is per­ma­nently under con­struc­tion. I was dis­mayed to find that white plas­tic wrapped around the dome of the Capi­tol Build­ing when I arrived in town. What are you going to do — decide not to shoot it and drive back home to Florida? Non­sense. I took my shots as I could get them and I’ll go back again when — I hope — the dome won’t be wrapped in plastic.

I took a num­ber of shots of this view while I had the chance. Who knows if I’ll get back up there? This shot is at 70m focal length, if you’re curi­ous about the per­spec­tive. I shot wider and tighter, too. The wider shots include a flag­pole in front of the Capi­tol from this per­spec­tive, so I played with it in a few com­po­si­tions. I keep com­ing back with this one, look­ing from Capi­tol Hill down the National Mall to the Lin­coln Memo­r­ial. It was a very cool expe­ri­ence. I mean that lit­er­ally, too. This was Feb­ru­ary and the wind was whip­ping pretty hard up there.

All I had to do to get access was ask nicely. You can’t beat that.