Manhole cover.
So I was striding down this local leafy lane on my Permitted Exercise, proving to myself quite successfully that zoomed multiple exposures in burst mode of local leafy lanes don’t work...
And my beady eye espied this curious piece of graphic design in the road. It was full of arrows - surely the most iconic of modern symbols: left, right, up, down, play, exit, this way, result, implication, inference, even - you’re lost really aren’t you?
To be fair I’d spotted this manhole cover many times before but mainly because of its curious behaviour after heavy rains. Then water emerges up and out of the cover and runs down the hill, a feature I think of a land drain blockage further down the hill. It’s been like that for years - presumably nobody has noticed or cared enough to do anything about it. Not that it really matters as the water disappears down the next cover.
High contrast graphic patterns like this are always good to play with I think, so this is for Sliders Sunday.
The effect is created entirely in Nik Color Efex by abusing the sliders in some of the more dramatic effects. The stack I ended up with is:
- Bi-color user Defined, orange bottom right to purple top left. I used this first to create a colour gradient across the image to add interest and variety to the pattern repeat.
- Solarisation. This one caused most of the colour drama. I have to admit that I am getting a little tired of the effects of this filter [Loud cheers are heard offstage...], but it does have a bit of an addictive colour-zap rush about it.
- Monday Morning - produces a dark moody glow, only applied to parts of the image to add to the tonal texture and variation.
- Low Key.
- Pro Contrast.
- Reflector efex.
These last four just toyed with the overall result.
So there we have it.
And, yes. You imagined it not. Your hapless correspondent has indeed sunk to the depths of talking about the local drains. He can descend no further… surely... please...
I’ll post a link to the in-camera original in the first comment so you can... er, well... add to your personal collection of manhole cover pics :)
Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday! :)
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