I hate power lines. It seems that any shot I try to compose in our historic districts has to either be drastically repositioned to avoid power lines or I have to spend an inordinate amount of time editing the power lines out of the photo in post processing. Let's face it, power lines just don't cut it in a scene depicting an 18th century historic site.
Earlier this week, a very interesting thread was posted in the 365Project forums on the artistic quality of power lines. A number of images were displayed showing how power lines can make very interesting subjects. Intrigued by the topic, I decided to give it a shot myself. These power lines are in Smithfield, and cut a swatch across much of the green space in the town. While not exactly legal, the power lines are heavily used by four-wheelers, mountain bikers, and dirt bikers. In any case, I wanted to show these power lines from an interesting perspective. Fortunately, the sky decided to cooperate and we had a very interesting cirrus cloud structure form prior to the cold front heading our way this evening. The decision to convert it to black and white was driven by the distraction all the greenery caused. The dense shrubs created too much foreground and background noise and stole too much of the show from the power lines. Going B&W brought the power lines back into the forefront.
Post processing started with Redynamix to really draw out the detail in the clouds. That filter produced a very noisy appearance, especially in the blue parts of the sky, so I then brought it into Neat Image and removed the noise. A levels adjustment was added followed by the b&w conversion using a gradient map in color blend mode. The final touch as usual was a sepia photo filter.
@janets Very much so! But then, that's one of the reasons I started 365 - to force me to photograph subjects I would typically ignore or avoid. @bkbinthecity Thanks, Bkb!
June 2nd, 2012
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@bkbinthecity Thanks, Bkb!