Photo of the Day 08/15/10 - All Tied Up

Another from my recent wanderings, this is a spot I stumbled on in Barnet, Vermont, near the Passumpsic River. I love the feel of old railroad tracks and bridges, especially when they're set off from a bright blue sky. It's that contrast of vibrancy that jumps out. It also tells a story of a fading, aging infrastructure, untended and ignored, set against the continual passage of time.

There's no shortage of flame wars in the millions of photography forums about the HDR vs. non-HDR, and my thoughts on it follow those of pros like Scott Bourne and David duChemin: "I don't care" and "serve your vision," respectively. There's a great passage in duChemin's latest book where he discusses the whole issue of photo manipulation that really touched a nerve for me where he says (and I'm paraphrasing) that what he wants most is to convey how the scene felt when he took the shot, not how the camera saw it (in its finite, limited pixel powers). That's precisely how I saw that bridge, jumping out from the greens and blues, because that's how it actually presented itself to me.

So, I used the tools available to express that vision. Serve your vision. It goes for more than just photography. Like Bourne said in his post yesterday (which I linked to in my post), don't get wrapped up in the dogmatic discussion, just make it happen. Unless you're a photojournalist, everything else is there to serve your vision and express the story you want to tell. 

Larger version here: All Tied Up