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"Bridge"

Lots of interesting lines and angles in this 70-year-old wooden truss bridge spanning the Little Bouctouche River in New Brunswick. An extremely wide-angle lens (12mm) allowed me to stand on the bridge and still fit much of the structure within the frame.

But a wide-angle lens creates significant perspective distortions. Notice the odd angles of the upper cross-beams in the "before" image. I could have avoided this by standing right in the middle of the bridge and pointing the camera straight down the center, but I thought that would have made for a boring composition.
I twisted the image until the cross-beams appeared horizontal. This made it necessary to crop the image - so you see that the "after" image is much tighter to the bridge structure than the "before". The tighter crop makes the curve of the arches more dominant and leads the eye nicely into the frame.

 The original image was underexposed and looked "flat". I made brightness and contrast adjustments to deal with this. The adjustments bring out the strips of flaking white paint on the bridge arches and trusses, and the detail of the roadbed - both of which were lost in the unprocessed image.

 mark@luxetveritas.ca
www.luxetveritas.net
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