Sunday, August 15, 2010

They call me, Don Quixote

Actually, I've been called a lot of things but Don Quixote isn't one of them. I don't know why but I felt compelled to take a few photos of these wind generators. I guess it is their massive size and the fact it looks like they are just popping out of the ground like a big flower.

I was told recently that the power company pays the land owner $3000 dollars per year for each wind generator they put on their property. There are more than fifty of these just along one ridge and the land is mostly owned by one individual. That's a pretty good living for doing nothing!

I have edited this post and added one more photo just for Paul. This will give some context to the size of the these things. The blue tanks are water towers and if you look just to the right of them between the trees you can see a power line pole. That is a "turkey buzzard" flying to the right of the wind generators, not a spot on my lens! LOL

5 comments:

  1. 50 wind mills on one ridge! That would have been enough to drove poor old Don Quixote nuts... Oh just a minute, I forgot, he was already nuts! LOL

    Difficult to appreciate the scale of these until you get up close or have something of a known size nearby to compare them to.

    Nice shooting and commentary once again!

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  2. Wow! Now that helps bring things into perspective!

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  3. This is a nice post Don er Ron! Sure wouldn't mind owning a couple miles or so of those Slick Hills!! I followed the line of mills all the way over to Saddle Mtn. one day starting over west of Elgin. Also met a lady getting gas at Lake Lawtonka who told me several of the mills were on her place.

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  4. Ron, by looking at these photos, and I came up some fun things to do on these wind mills, if you want to go back to this location.
    1. You can create 6 blades on this mill by taking low and high continuous exposures, then merge images on the photoshop elements.
    2. Slow shutter speed with ND filter.
    3. Line up the wind mills, and shoot with f/16 or f/22 during sun set.

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  5. Thanks for the ideas Quyhn Le! Lining the up may be a problem since they don't like people on the property but I'm still searching out public roads that will get me some different views.

    I especially like the idea of the ND filter to slow the shutter speed and get some motion on the blades. Excellent idea! I'll work on that one for sure.

    I'll have to think about the Elements and six blade idea. I'm still not great with layers and I get frustrated to the point of wanting to shoot my computer! LOL

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