On the Road - photography
 

It's an overused turn of phrase, but - I have always had a fascination with power lines, especially the tall metal structures for long distance wires. When we visited Vegas recently I tried to capture some of these on the way. Some have a tiny bit of photoshop manipulation but mostly they're just cropped. This is all enroute, we never stopped the car.

On the Road

I foresee an encounter with the Department of Homeland Defence in your future.

Great pictures! It certainly captures the "cross country driving" experience (minus the stinky restrooms).

When we went on long car trips when I was a kid, my little sister imaged those large power line towers to be people. IMGP6768.JPG is a boy tower. IMGP6763.JPG is a girl tower.

Cool pictures! Did you take those while the car was moving? They aren't blurry. I'm always impressed with how many different designs there are. You captured alot of them. The really big ones always look like some kind of a robot man, holding the lines in his hands.

I remember going to Bodie a while back and learned it was one of the first towns to get electricity in that area. They were getting their power from a hydro-electric station about 13 miles away. They built the power lines in a straight line because they were afraid the power would jump the lines! more info here.

Oh, totally. Sometimes they even have attitudes, stances. I also see them as monsters, devouring people and cars, tearing up roads. But instead they're just sentinels, forever standing still, Atlases of power and communication, bearing the load.

I forsee more playing around with this concept in my future.

Yup. Maybe next time I'll even use GD's SLR - this was just our pocket cam. It does road shots well.

Very cool photos! I like the concept of boy or girl or monsters. I totally see them as mad scientist created robots intent on destruction and ruin!

I'm surprised we haven't seen artists pick up on the potential of these structures by designing ones that are, well, pieces of art. I mean, talk about a visible sculpture!

I'm sure you can find many examples of individual power structures that have been designed to something less utilitarian, but I think the driving factor in their look is the fact that you need several of them per mile of line.

The Pacific Intertie transmission line connects Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River in Washington to Los Angeles. That one high capacity line is more about 900 miles long. Meaning that several thousand towers are needed. So, I imagine that fincancial considerations quickly reduce all design considerations to:

1. What design requires the fewest materials.
2. What design requires the least work to construct.

Personally, I find them to be elegant statements of functional design, and even within that there are interesting variations. They're only rendered boring by their ceaseless repetition. But that complaint is somewhat like saying they should do something to make railroad ties more visually powerful.

There was (or maybe still is) a pump oil well it Huntington Beach that was painted to look like a grasshopper. It was one of my favorite random things as a child.

Did you ever see the big Union 76 oil storage tank that they made to look like a pumpkin every year? I don't remember exactly where it was, but somewhere in the Long Beach/Wilmington area if I remember correctly.

I've always dug them as is but this idea has come to my mind as well. Lately, I've been thinking more about the newer phenomenon of cell towers. Now THERE is a way artists could beautify the landscape in a utilitarian way. Instead, we have those awful fake trees that not only look horrible when new, but fade within a year to even worse states of ugliness. They don't need to be expensive sculptures, just eye-pleasing ones. I'm almost irked enough to start a movement...

Very cool. For some reason I can't quite place, I really dig the last one. Maybe it's because it sort of resembles the outline of a GIANT ROBOT FACE.

I don't know. It's just...pretty and geometric and nifty.

I'm assuming you mean the 2nd to last one...'cause that one's totally a Decepticon.

More than meets the eye.

Very nice. For some reason, I really enjoy looking at all the pictures together, even more than individually. Perhaps there's an interesting collage there waiting to happen.

Yes, that one. And, totally!

Hehe. I'm not sure what I'll do with them. Maybe I'll make an appointment to work on it this week...