Bonneville Dam

This is Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, and is my “Machines” entry for the World Wide Panorama project.

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This is Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River. This picture was taken from just in front of visitor center on the Oregon side. This VR was my entry for the WWP “Machines” theme in June, 2013.

Originally I was going to take a picture in the turbine room. But post-911 security makes it more difficult to do that. Possible, but on an earlier scouting trip this scene jumped out as another option, and didn’t require the planning and coordination.

My daughter went with me, both on the scouting trip and to actually take the picture. This is always fun, and adds a great memory. We had fun exploring Cascade Locks, found a fun place for lunch, hit a waterfall or two, and generally had a great time.

The theme was fun, using the dam as a machine that powers other machines. I liked the big turbine blade, which added a little to the “machine” element. When putting this together, I debated between using either the blade, or the dam itself, as the opening scene.

The processing wasn’t too complex, although it took a little work with several exposures to get detail in the water. With the exposure that worked for everything else, the water coming out of the dam was totally blown out, so had to do some blending to bring in some detail. Seemed to work out ok.