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This series of images of Ironworkers is from the official Groundbreaking for the Downtown Span of the Louisville Bridges Project. After over twenty years of planning, revisions and indecision the new bridge to carry traffic over the Ohio River is finally underway. With a completion date of 2016 this is going to be a very intense and fast paced construction project. Not only will there be two new Ohio River Bridges built, one on the east end of Louisville connecting I-265 in Kentucky to I-265 in Indiana, there will be over 29 additional spans in the area known as “Spaghetti Junction” to connect the converging interstate highways of I-71, I-64 and I-65 to the new Ohio River Span.

I have decided to create a project that will focus not only on the bridge construction itself but more importantly on the skilled trades and laborers who will do the actual work of building the bridge and the many other structures that will be needed to see the project to completion. My goal with this endeavor will be to memorialize the contribution of the men and women whose hands are on the tools and give them a place in the history of this project. I hope to give faces and names to those who are making history and to leave behind a testament to them that their families and friends can go to to see them as they were building these bridges.

The first image today is of Dean Tharp the President of Ironworkers Local 70 as he and several other members attended the official groundbreaking ceremony. It is from a three frame bracket set of -2, 0 and +2 EV merged in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 and finished in Aperture 3. I especially like the way the safety vests and t-shirts create a strong visual component in the composition as well as the detail of Dean’s tools which are the hallmark of Ironworkers everywhere. I also find the guy in the safety green shirt interesting because he is looking into the camera and is the only construction worker in safety green in the image. I think his posture and presence gives an added element to the overall composition.

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This second image is a single frame of the three frame bracket set I was shooting that day.  I chose to process it as a single frame because there was too much movement by the people in the scene for the anti-ghosting feature of NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to resolve. I used the underexposed frame of +2 EV because it gave the best rendering of the clouds and because there was plenty of light in the shadows to be able to show the detail there too. I used Aperture 3 exclusively to process the image adjusting the individual color channels to achieve the level of saturation and luminance I wanted in the final image.

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This image of Dean Tharp is another single frame processed in Aperture 3 using the same techniques as the previous image.