Power Towers

Posted by Twelvebit (Victoria, United States) on 12 April 2008 in Business & Industry.

I was flipping through a book on digital photography at a book store and it said that if you scanned a B&W negative on RGB you got unusual colors. Apparently my film scanner is too smart to be fooled this way as it rendered the image in B&W even though I told it to scan it as color negative using calibrated RGB. The simple B&W image just did not work for me so I read it into Nikon NX and played around with various filter combinations until I found something I liked.

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Comments (8)

Ana Lúcia from Leiria, Portugal

Great colors/industrial shot!

12 Apr 2008 8:58am

@Ana Lúcia: Thank you. Back in my film days I had no real outlet for shots like this that needed extensive processing.

Observing from Chester, United Kingdom

A fantastic industrial image that I like very much. But, only man could have made something like this.

12 Apr 2008 1:24pm

@Observing: Thank you. I thought I had something here when I originally took this image. However, a straight print was pretty flat and uninteresting. It would have been VERY difficult to make a print that looked like this off the original negative (one reason is because burning and dodging would have required some pretty complicated mask cutting).

Will from Gainesville, United States

great shot and feel...love the processing:)

12 Apr 2008 6:23pm

@Will: Thanks. Looking at your images I can tell I have a lot to learn about processing.

Ronnie 2¢ from London, United Kingdom

It is good to experiment now and then to see where it might take us . . this certainly settles nicely into the oily industrial tone. Man has a lot to answer for.

12 Apr 2008 10:48pm

@Ronnie 2¢: In fact, looking at some of the other work on Animus and the fabulous processing, I think I need to experiment a lot more than I have been.

MadScientist from Düsseldorf, Germany

That worked out fine; very dramatic, I like it!

12 Apr 2008 11:26pm

@MadScientist: I won't say it would have been "impossible" to get this result back in my darkroom days, but it would have gone well beyond my own darkroom skills to get a print that looked like this off the original negative. The prints I did make were flat and uninteresting.

Alun Lambert from Cheshire, United Kingdom

Love this image, the colors great.

14 Apr 2008 9:05pm

@Alun Lambert: Thanks. Unfortunately, the scanner won't automatically remove dust and scratches from B&W film so there is a lot of cleanup necessary to print this one.

danthro from Suburbia, United States

great shot! like the tint, contrast, perspective, composition, clouds/sky. could you hear or feel the electricity being so close to the power towers?

14 Apr 2008 9:09pm

@danthro: Hear it, mostly. Getting touched with one of these lines is instant grisly death. It's a little irrational because it doesn't happen often that a line parts and falls, but I don't like standing under high voltage lines. But is does happen. I know of a company that got sued when a distribution line (7200 volts) fell on a teenager standing underneath it. Usually, though, they come down because people pull them down. People have been known to actually throw ropes over distribution lines (these are much bigger, higher, and higher voltage transmission lines), pulling them down and killing themselves in the process.