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Work has begun on the Downtown Bridge carrying I-65 across the Ohio River from Louisville. The impact on Waterfront Park should be minimal because the Waterfront Development Corporation had the foresight to prepare a place for it to cross the park. The Waterfront Development Corporation made sure to keep any major component of the park out of this area in an effort to accomodate the bridge and still have a world class park along the Louisville waterfront. This type of forward thinking is the hallmark of the Waterfront Development Corporation which has returned the waterfront to the citizens of Louisville as the “Commons” that the city’s founders envisioned.
As with the Big Four Bridge project I am excited to see and photograph the changing face of Louisville as it continues it’s march into the future. Over the course of the next two years I will be following the construction and the people making it happen. After shooting the Big Four Project I have discovered how much I enjoy construction projects and will certainly be following this latest engineering feat as the work progresses.
I shot this image in the part of the day that most photography “experts” would say to put the camera away. The conventional thinking is that midday light is too harsh and the only time to shoot landscapes is during the “golden hours” or the “blue hours”. I don’t think that is necessary and subscribe to the belief that even when the sun is high in the sky there are plenty of good photo opportunities if one will only open one’s eyes and mind to the possibilities. This particular day the sky was full of interesting cloud formations as a low pressure front was pushing in from the south and colliding with a high pressure front from the north. Had the sky been empty I might have chosen another framing to show the park and construction project.
The image was created from a three frame bracket set using +2, 0 and -2 EV. I first took all three RAW images into NIK Sharpener Pro where I applied some initial sharpening. I then merged the three shots in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 and applied the Deep 2 preset before returning the merged image to Aperture 3 where I applied several adjustments to saturation and luminance in an effort to tone down the colors slightly. I then straightened and cropped the image and applied the final sharpening.
I like that you are willing to choose a personal vision over some outdated thought that one must follow some “rule”, and are not one of those tiresome promoters of “out-of-the-camera-only”. I enjoyed your image and the accompanying conversation.
I too find the “out of camera only” posturing to be pretentious and smug. The computer is an integral part of photography today and suggesting that it is somehow more virtuos to produce work without using editing software. Most who espouse this view ignore the fact that the jpeg image they get “out of camera” is already adjusted to an arbitrary standard which is included in the camer’s programing.
I think I would enjoy having a coffee sometime with you.
Thank you. If you come to Louisville it would be my pleasure to have a coffee and a conversation.
Ya never know…wouldn’t that be fun.