B. Payden Photography, LLC

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B. Payden Photography, LLC We are a full service studio serving all of VA, MD and DC.

I stopped and created this quick shot while driving home. It was a short drive — I’d just shot the eighth-grade boys’ so...
10/24/2026

I stopped and created this quick shot while driving home. It was a short drive — I’d just shot the eighth-grade boys’ soccer playoff match at the middle school, camera bag in the passenger seat, and then saw this view on my way in at the back gate. I pulled over by the water and the entire lake was completely still.

This is Turtle Island—a little island in the cove where Flat Run feeds into the lake. The water was so flat it reflected everything: the treeline, the first signs of fall color on the opposite shore, and all the other features in a mirror image. That sky displayed a pink hue that lasts only a few minutes before it disappears. Docks lined the left-hand side, boats still tied up for the season, and string lights lit the deck to the right, with no one else about except me and whatever moved in the shallow waters.

Sometimes you’ll shoot a game and end up with 400 frames of athletes running up and down a pitch. Other times you pull off the road on the way home, and the light presents you with something better. I didn’t edit this frame much — it was basically like this. I created this image using my sports shoot setup on a Canon EOS 5D III with a 70-200mm lens. Virginia in the fall is difficult to beat. If you’re local and have a section of shoreline that you like, please put it in the comments, as I’m always on the lookout for more spots.

Cedar Creek, Rockbridge County, Virginia, Natural Bridge State Park.This creek formed the arch that gives the park its n...
10/23/2026

Cedar Creek, Rockbridge County, Virginia, Natural Bridge State Park.

This creek formed the arch that gives the park its name. The rock the creek flows over is limestone deposited during the Ordovician period, about 500 million years ago, when the area was part of the seafloor. As the park’s own trail guide states, a sinkhole redirected Cedar Creek underground about a million years ago; the cave it cut finally collapsed, leaving only the thickest section of its roof. This part is now the bridge. The creek flows toward the James River and will eventually reach the Chesapeake Bay.

Virginia established the park as its 37th state park on September 24, 2016, following over two centuries of private ownership—a history which includes Thomas Jefferson, who originally purchased the bridge and 157 of the adjacent acres from King George III in 1774 for the equivalent of 20 shillings; the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation currently manages the park.

This Image was created using a Phase One 645DF camera fitted with a Phase One P40+ film back and a 35mm lens. Since it’s medium format, you have to take your time — each photo is a deliberate choice, not part of a burst sequence. Standing in the middle of the creek alongside a tripod and waiting for the right light is part of the beauty of creating this print.

That’s the purpose of my artwork: to help balance the scales against all the ugliness in the world today. I don’t deny any of it, but I include something quiet and true on the other side of the account.

If you go, the address is 6477 South Lee Highway, Natural Bridge, VA. The Cedar Creek Trail extends from the visitor center below the bridge to Lace Falls. A fee is charged per person to use that trail; the park is open from 8 a.m. until dusk, and the best advice comes directly from the trail guide—take only photographs and leave only your footprints.

Bryant Payden | B. Payden Photography

Natural Bridge has been on my bucket list for years; last week, I checked it off. I created this image last week at Natu...
10/22/2026

Natural Bridge has been on my bucket list for years; last week, I checked it off. I created this image last week at Natural Bridge State Park in Virginia—standing underneath that 215-foot limestone arch with Cedar Creek flowing below it and watching the light shift across the rock face—and from the moment I composed the shot, I knew it had the look of a poster.

A bit of historical background, since this site has a rich history—Natural Bridge is older than the nearby mountains and has attracted visitors for centuries; Thomas Jefferson owned it and called it “the most sublime of nature’s works.” It has been designated a National Historic Landmark since 1998. Although the park is small and peaceful, the arch speaks for itself.

I redrew it. I processed the photograph in Photoshop, then in Illustrator and InDesign—smoothing the shapes, reducing the color range to deep greens and warm ochres, slightly reimagining the view, and constructing the type by hand. The characteristic look of a WPA poster can do what a photograph often cannot: it transforms a place you have stood in into an art piece you remember.

The WPA style is worth knowing. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration employed artists through the Federal Art Project, and the National Park Service produced hundreds of silkscreen posters between about 1935 and 1943 to promote the parks. These posters were cheap to print, displayed in train stations and schools, and mostly discarded afterward—only a few dozen of the originals are known to have survived. What remained was the style: flat shapes, a limited color palette, bold typeface, and a landscape simplified to its most memorable lines.

You can find all the posters from my State Parks series, inspired by the WPA, in my Etsy shop—click the link in my bio. If there’s a park you’d like to see receiving the same treatment, please mention it in the comments. 👇

Yesterday morning at the James River Gorge, the entire gorge became a bowl of light.At golden hour over Balcony Falls in...
10/21/2026

Yesterday morning at the James River Gorge, the entire gorge became a bowl of light.

At golden hour over Balcony Falls in the James River Gorge, fog flowed down the valley, spreading out as water does when it reaches a level. Although the peaks remained golden, all the land beneath vanished into cloud.

Regarding the gorge: The James River Gorge is a canyon about one thousand feet deep, located where the James River goes through the Blue Ridge on the border between Amherst and Bedford counties. It is a water gap—that is, one of the rare spots where a river can flow directly through a mountain range—and within the gorge the river drops approximately 200 feet over a distance of four miles.

A Thousand Years of Traffic: Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources notes that as early as 1775, Amherst County sat “near the upper end of navigation with small craft”. In 1824, the state-owned James River Company started the seven-and-a-half-mile-long Blue Ridge Canal to go around Balcony Falls and the gorge’s rapids. The true canal period began in 1835 with the James River and Kanawha Company; the second section, built through the difficult terrain between Lynchburg and Buchanan, was finished in 1851. Before that, the Monacan tribe controlled this gorge and used their dugout canoes and riverside trails to move goods, trade, and communicate with their neighbors, the Powhatan Confederacy, to the east.

Regarding the light: Golden hour refers to the period just after sunrise and just before sunset, when the light is soft, beautiful, and warm. Because sunlight has to pass through more atmosphere, blue wavelengths scatter, leaving the yellow, orange, and red wavelengths—those warm tones that photographers love; it also provides directional lighting in the form of long, low shadows that define the ridges rather than flattening them.

Most of my landscape work comes down to patience—choosing the viewing position and then waiting for the fog, the sun, and the ridgeline to agree. They did so this morning.


Bryant Payden, B. Payden Photography

Leesylvania State Park, Woodbridge, VA — 720nm infrared, full-spectrum-converted Sony A6000.This is a footbridge. That's...
10/15/2026

Leesylvania State Park, Woodbridge, VA — 720nm infrared, full-spectrum-converted Sony A6000.

This is a footbridge. That's it. A wooden footbridge in a state park, on a Sunday afternoon, over a ditch that most people walk past without a second look.

Shot at 720nm, everything changes. Chlorophyll reflects near-infrared light — that's why the willow and the hardwood foliage behind it come back blazing white instead of green. Blue sky absorbs infrared, so it drops toward black. Water goes dark for the same reason. What was a green-and-blue afternoon turns into something closer to a snow scene in July.

Leesylvania is a 500-acre peninsula on the tidal Potomac, wedged between Neabsco Creek and Powells Creek, about 25 miles south of DC. Locals call the point "Freestone Point" for the sandstone early settlers quarried here. Henry Lee II settled the land in 1747; eight children were born on it, including Henry Lee III — "Light-Horse Harry" — a Revolutionary cavalry colonel, Virginia's governor from 1791 to 1794, and Robert E. Lee's father. The park has five hiking trails and carries a segment of the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail.

On first seeing this composition, while hiking the Potomac and Lee’s Woods trails, I stopped and set up my tripod because a footbridge with a willow dangling over it reflected the late-afternoon light in a way that made me wonder what it would look like beyond the visible spectrum. That is the entire aim of the project: photographing everyday places everybody already knows, using a light the human eye can’t see.

For anyone who is interested, this image was created with a full-spectrum converted Sony A6000 equipped with a 720nm filter. 720 is my current preferred wavelength because it provides enough infrared to make the foliage appear white, while still retaining enough visible light to preserve the texture of the wood and the shadow details underneath the bridge in a black-and-white infrared image, and it also produces beautiful false-color infrared images.

Everyday places. New light.

If you've never shot infrared, find someone who has a converted body and borrow it for an afternoon. You'll never look at a willow tree the same way.

About half a mile as the crow flies, and 160-odd years, flattened into one frame by a 150mm lens on a medium-format sens...
10/14/2026

About half a mile as the crow flies, and 160-odd years, flattened into one frame by a 150mm lens on a medium-format sensor.

This 4.5-inch siege r***e sits on the bluffs at Chatham Manor, on the Stafford Heights side of the Rappahannock, overlooking Downtown Fredericksburg. During the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862), the Union Army used that bluff for its artillery batteries, and Chatham served as the headquarters for General Edwin Sumner’s Right Grand Division. Although Burnside kept his headquarters at the Phillips House farther along Stafford Heights, he met with his top generals at Chatham before the attack—and the park records that he waited there anxiously for news of Franklin’s advance. After the fighting ceased, the house became a hospital and served in that capacity from December 11 until December 25. During that time, Clara Barton, Mary Walker, and Walt Whitman all attended to the wounded there.

The town in the distance had been shelled and looted. The church steeples, which still characterize its skyline today, were the same ones that defined it then.

The gun itself isn’t the focus; rather, it forms the front third of a depth stack, with the 150mm lens handling the rest and lifting the town out of the shallow river valley so the church spires end up almost at the same level as the barrel. The P40+ sensor measures 43.9 × 32.9mm, smaller than a full 645 frame, giving it a 1.3× lens factor and making the 150mm lens equivalent to about 195mm on a full-frame camera. This isn’t a matter of resolution in the medium-format system; it’s about how a 40MP CCD renders tonal separation in flat, overcast light—such as skies, bare branches, and brick—without the contrast turning muddy and compressing the scene into a meaningful capture.

The photograph was taken on the grounds of Chatham Manor, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, currently the park’s headquarters.

Fall on Skyline DriveThis week the colors are marching right along down the Blue Ridge—the first wave of yellow and rust...
10/13/2026

Fall on Skyline Drive

This week the colors are marching right along down the Blue Ridge—the first wave of yellow and rust creeping down the ridges before the oaks turn completely orange. I haven’t made it to Skyline yet this year, but here is an image I created in early fall 2012, taken when I went to the Marys Rock Tunnel and waited for a gap in traffic.

Skyline Drive extends 105 miles along the top of Shenandoah National Park, starting in Front Royal and ending at Rockfish Gap, with 75 viewpoints along the route. The Marys Rock Tunnel is the road’s narrowest section—610 feet long—and was drilled straight through the granite at the 32.2-mile point; it was completed in 1932 and has a clearance of only 12 feet 8 inches.

What attracted me was the effect of the compression: on one side the autumn crowded the road, on the other stone and shadow, and the yellow center line drew the eye directly into the tunnel. It’s the kind of scene that makes it worthwhile to stay in one place for twenty minutes rather than take photographs from the car window.

That is the subject of my work: quiet places, patient light, and the small windows through which a landscape shows its structure. Capturing a quiet moment in time. Fine art prints are available; see the link in my bio.

That hour at Leesylvania when the sky catches fire, and the pier goes quiet. 🌅If you’ve spent a summer on the Potomac, y...
10/13/2026

That hour at Leesylvania when the sky catches fire, and the pier goes quiet. 🌅

If you’ve spent a summer on the Potomac, you know this view — The Potomac River, the gazebo holding the last light, the far shore dissolving into trees. We turned it into a WPA-style travel poster: the flat color fields and bold type of the 1930s Federal Art Project, redrawn for a Virginia shoreline.

Deep indigo up top, magenta and flame orange in the middle, and that one warm band of sand leading your eye in. Printed on heavyweight archival matte paper in three sizes — 12×18, 20×30, and 26×36.

For everyone who grew up near Woodbridge. For the kayakers, the fishermen, the sunset chasers. For anyone whose heart still lives a little bit on that beach.

Virginia State Parks series — this is the first. Which park should come next? 👇

📦 Ships rolled in a rigid tube · Link in bio

Fall is just starting to show its hand at Leesylvania State Park 🍂That late-afternoon light hitting the weeping willow, ...
10/13/2026

Fall is just starting to show its hand at Leesylvania State Park 🍂

That late-afternoon light hitting the weeping willow, with the wooden footbridge tucked into the edge of the frame — Woodbridge, you were showing off today. Golden hour in October really is the cheat code.

Give it a few more weeks and this whole stretch will be on fire.

📍 Leesylvania State Park, Woodbridge, VA

The New River Gorge Bridge, framed in autumn gold 🍂🌉This gorge was cut by one of America’s oldest rivers, and the WPA-er...
10/09/2026

The New River Gorge Bridge, framed in autumn gold 🍂🌉

This gorge was cut by one of America’s oldest rivers, and the WPA-era style still feels like the right way to celebrate it: America’s newest national park, and one of West Virginia’s wildest views.

This poster is part of Monuments and Meadows, a collection of vintage-style travel posters and my fine art photography devoted to America’s public lands. Each piece is constructed the same way as 1930s park posters — with bold, flat colors, hand-drawn letters, and a screen-print texture — so it looks appropriate in a frame on a wall you actually live in.

🛒 The full collection is on Etsy now — link in bio�
🌐 Coming soon to my projects art website

Add it to your fall road trip list and tell someone who needs to see the New River Gorge in October.

📍 New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia

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Locust Grove, VA

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Tuesday 9:30am - 8pm
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Thursday 9:30am - 8pm
Friday 9:30am - 8pm
Saturday 10am - 2pm

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