Bridges

Today i decided to walk up the old RR tracks again, with an eye toward seeing what I could do with the several bridges which cross over the tracks. I duly took pictures, and when I got home I sat down to the computer to see what I had.

My original idea was to make black & white pictures of what I'd shot, but two of the three subjects really didn't convert to b&w very well at all. I played with the Photoshop™ filters for painting styles for a while, and still nothing seemed to work just right. But I noticed that turning up the saturation a good bit, something I do before applying "painting" styles to more closely approximate real paint from tubes, was starting to look like a slightly familiar style. I applied a slight amount of posterizing and then applied the texture filter to try to approximate the linen texture of old postcards. Voilà! The top photo is the Van Zandt St. bridge, and the bottom shot is the Peary St. bridge.

However, the third shot really did work very well as a b&w picture. I think the variety of angles involved and the essential monochrome quality of the subject in the first place made this an ideal b&w shot. So here's the tangle of on- and off-ramps for the Newport Bridge as they cross over the old railroad tracks.

© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger