A viaduct is a long bridge consisting of a series of short spans supported on piers or towers. In the U.S. viaducts became popular in the era of railroad building to take the rails across wide valleys. Not long ago I had a two-viaduct day in northern Pennsylvania. The best photos are aerial shots with blue sky, fall foliage, and an historic locomotive traversing the span. I didn’t manage that, but viaducts are nonetheless interesting subjects worth capturing.

I found three aspects of viaducts I could treat on a cloudy winter’s day: the panorama of the setting, the craftsmanship of construction, and life under the bridge.

Starrucca Viaduct. Larger version here.

It’s too early for most of the mustard flowers, but we traveled to Napa this week to see how things were progressing. I wanted to make the best of a partly cloudy sky, so I took two frames for a spliced panorama. If the sky and the ground are in a single frame, the sky is usually overexposed and and the ground underexposed. With two images, the camera exposure adjusts separately for the sky and ground. The image breaks two rules of composition.

Patrick’s Point is on the north coast of California, roughly 75 miles south of the Oregon border. This is in a land of stunning scenery. Wild rhododendrons grow among redwoods, and the forests top cliffs above the ocean beaches. Patrick’s Point State Park features Agate Trail, with dramatic vistas as it winds down to the ocean. As I learned, the problem with photographing the scenes is that the forest is dark and the ocean is bright. It takes some Photoshop adjustment to produce a good picture.

There was back lighting on the dried grass running up the hill, so it was time to feature the grass. I was only carrying a pocket camera on our early evening walk, so I took three frames to cover the hill up to the hilltop yuccas.

The high percentage of sky caused the exposure to be reduced, compared to the darker scene at ground level. This has the good effect of keeping some detail in the clouds. The sky in the lower image is blanked by overexposure.

I was trying to get the woman walking down the path, the kite fliers flying kites, and a car traveling on the road, all captured for a stitched panorama. It’s important to have a zone at the frame edges with no motion so that the stitching can occur successfully.

The Photomerge™ option in Adobe Photoshop Elements serves to stitch multiple images together into one. It usually works remarkably well, but sometimes it just doesn’t do the job. In those cases, the problem can often be solved by perspectively correcting the individual images before merging them.