Tag: KY

Big Four Bridge at night

Waterfront Park Big Four Bridge at Night

Long time visitors to Speeddemon2 Photography know that I spent over a year and a half photographing the crew from T&C Construction as they converted the Big Four Bridge into a pedestrian bridge between Louisville’s Waterfront Park and Jeffersonville Indiana. At the time I thought that completing the bridge conversion was the final chapter in the building of Waterfront Park. Little did I know that it was simply another milestone in the plan by the non-profit Waterfront Development Corporation to give Louisville a signature park on the riverfront.

Big Four Bridge at night
Big Four Bridge at night

Not long after the bridge opened to pedestrians the folks at Waterfront Park launched a fund raising drive to light up the bridge with programmable LED lighting that would showcase the bridge at night. Now nearly two years after the first visitors walked up onto the bridge the Waterfront Development Corporation has once again surpassed expectations and finished the LED lighting project. The addition of these lights has really made the bridge a standout attraction for the city of Louisville.

Those of use who lived here in the 1970s fondly recall how the local FM Rock and Roll radio station WLRS would light the bridge with white light bulbs during the Christmas holiday season. At that time the bridge sat unconnected to either Kentucky or Indiana amid junkyards, ramshackle buildings, oil tanks and an asphalt plant. During the daytime our waterfront was a pretty ugly sight that greeted visitors to Louisville as they crossed the Ohio River on I-65’s Kennedy Bridge but at night, during the holidays, it was a magical transformation of light and form.

Thanks to the forward thinking of many people that image of Louisville has been erased and replaced with a truly amazing park. The way the bridge is lighted now really makes a statement about how beautiful this bridge is and how important it is to both Louisville and Jeffersonville. Now we have a wonderful park and can enjoy a view of the city that is simply amazing. The new lighting is capable of changing color and light patterns through programmed instructions. Not only that but there is also a sound system on the central sections that plays music which the lights are tied into and can change in time with the music.

Click on the image gallery to view these images in a larger light box slideshow.

All the images in this post are three frame brackets sets of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures that were merged into HDR images using NIK HDR Efex Pro 2. After merging them I then took the resulting HDR image into Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CS5 to finish processing it. I discovered that using this method really allowed me to show the way the light played across the bridge and filled the insides of many of the bridge girders.

All images in this post are available printed on .040″ aluminum using dye sublimation technology in either Gloss or Satin finishes. They are available in any dimension from 14″ to 96″ wide with an appropriate height

Use the form below to contact me for sizes and pricing.

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Carpenters Working On Tower Three West From an Aerial Lift.

Carpenters of the Ohio River Bridges Project

This post showcases several different images of the Carpenter’s trade.

Was a Rainbow Over the Downtown Span of the Ohio River Bridges Project a Positive Omen?

I try to capture something from the Ohio River Bridges Project nearly every workday. The rapid progress that is being made now is transforming the landscape all along the construction site. It isn’t always possible to be in just the right place every day but I really hope to provide a pretty complete view of how the Ohio River Bridges Project is progressing. I like to think that this rainbow is a positive omen for the project and for my own desire to show the world of heavy highway and bridge construction to the world though my images.

The other morning there were scattered showers moving in from the northwest and I was lucky enough to be in just the right place when the morning sunrise illuminated a gorgeous rainbow over the construction at Towers 4 and 5. I was on the Kentucky shore where the bridge will land in Louisville. I adjusted my vantage point in an effort to align the base of the rainbow with the eastern tower on pier 5. In doing so I was also able to include it’s intersection with the eastern tower at pier 4. In the upper right hand corner of the image is another faint rainbow that I discovered during processing.

Rainbow over the bridge towers for the Ohio River Bridges Project Downtown Span being built by Walsh Construction in Louisville, Kentucky, November 2014
Rainbow over the bridge towers for the Ohio River Bridges Project Downtown Span being built by Walsh Construction in Louisville, Kentucky, November 2014

Click the image to open it enlarged in a separate window.

The images in this post were captured all around the Ohio River Bridges Project in Louisville Kentucky in the past 30 days. There are photos of individual tradesmen, progress on the Downtown Span and the reconfiguring of Spaghetti Junction. All this activity keeps me hopping as I try to capture the process as well as the progress of this massive Heavy Highway and Bridge Construction project.

In several of these photos I have taken the liberty of sharing different versions of the same scenes. I like to use HDR techniques and HDR software when capturing and processing my images. I often like to take those same HDR images into various Black and White processing apps. I am not married to any one B&W app and use many different plug-ins as well as the B&W conversion tools in Photoshop CS5 and Aperture 3. I like the variety of effects I can get by using Topaz B&W, onOne B&W Effects and NIK Silver Efex Pro 2.

 

Walsh Construction has placed the first sections of bridge deck panels for the Downtown Span of the Ohio River Bridges Project in Louisville, Kentucky.

The First Structural Steel Girders For The Downtown Span are Installed

This post and the accompanying photos show how much progress has been made on the Downtown Span of the Ohio River Bridges Project in Louisville Kentucky.

Lisa Lauderdale Ironworker Local 70

Photos of Lisa Lauderdale, an Ironworker in Local 70, working on a rebar caisson for the Ohio River Bridges Project in Louisville, KY.