Make the extra effort

Making a photo often means making an extra effort and going out of your way.  Driving along the interstate, particularly in the midwest, you are apt to see a lot of these giant electric generation devices.  Windmills, such as these in Oklahoma, appear quite small at a distance against the larger open spaces of the landscape.  They are quite large in fact, with each of the three blades having a length of about 90 feet.  Making a photograph like the one above requires some effort on the part of the photographer.  The first order of business is finding an exit where you can get off so you can drive back to the location.   Even if you could stop on the interstate, which is illegal, in all likelihood you would be too far from the subject.  

In this instance, I had to drive an additional five miles to the nearest exit and then five miles back along the service road to make the photo.  I made about two dozen exposures and selected this one as the one I liked the best.  The image was made with a medium telephoto lens.  It was later converted to black and white in Photoshop as I felt the absence of color made the graphics stronger and what minimum color there was, against the light in early morning, served little purpose.

Taking the photo took me about forty minutes out of my way as I had to drive back to the exit once more to resume my travels on the main highway.  If you're on a journey and one of your main goals is to make images of what you see along the way, time between stops must remain fluid.  While my ultimate destination on this particular trip was Utah, I was in no particular hurry to get there.  Time constraints are an artificial limitation in such circumstances.  The downside, of this kind of journey, is that it prevents you from making hotel reservations ahead most of the time.  When traveling in this fashion, I'm never exactly sure where I'm going to be when my day ends or at exactly what time I'm going to arrive.