Washington Metro Construction Gantry

Washington Metro Elevated Track Construction Gantry, McLean, Virginia

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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.