Washington Metro Construction Gantry

Washington Metro Elevated Track Construction Gantry, Route 123, McLean, Fairfax County, Virginia

Washington Metro Elevated Track Construction Gantry, McLean, Virginia

–  Click on the image to enlarge or purchase  –

Washington Metro Construction Gantry

Washington Metro is building a new line to Dulles Airport currently named the Silver Line.  Along with the construction of additional lanes for the Washington beltway,  this construction is causing many delays and other headaches to those of us who live in the area.  However, it does provide for some unique images.

This is one of the gantries used to construct the concrete base for the elevated track.  These are specialist cranes which basically move along the structure laying the concrete sections ahead of themselves before they move on.

I made this image late one afternoon as the sun was setting using the warm light to highlight the vivid yellow and blue of the steel girders.  It is a 7 shot HDR which helped bring out the detail in both the crane and the elevated concrete track bed it had previously laid.  After tonemapping the image in HDR Efex Pro, I adding some extra contrast using the Tone Contrast in Nik Color Efex Pro. The sky then had the noise removed using Nik Dfine 2.0 suitable masked so as not to effect areas where I wished to retain the gritty feeling.

I finished the image by giving it a 16:9 ratio crop to remove some of the excess sky which I felt did nothing to help the image.

9 Comments

  1. Such vibrant colors and excellent framing.

  2. That sunset has really thrown some fine looking light on your subject. Great use of HDR.

  3. I really like the strong colors in this shot. Great composition and terrific processing. Nice!

  4. Man, look at all that steel!! (or at least I think it is steel…) I have seen these close up and they are pretty menacing! Well done with the capture!!

  5. wow that is a cool find, love that framing too! great colors as well!

  6. Love the vibrancy of this, Mark. So nicely composed and processed.

    I’ve been coming to the DC area for a lifetime and can recall not a single time that something was not under construction. 🙂 This was a nice find, man.

  7. Powerful colors and composition Mark!

  8. Wow the sun and HDR has really made the colours in this POP

  9. Love your blog! Hope for more posts!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Copy Protected by Chetan's WP-Copyprotect.