Highways

I love highways (as we call them in Canada, in the States they're freeways) because I think they are beautiful. Sometimes for being so long and straight. Sometimes for the graceful arcs of onramps. If you search Flickr, you'll find hundreds of photos that show highway ramps - mostly at night because the colours make them so surreal. I found a very cool site made up of screen grabs from Google Earth. In the old iteration the author went by GlobeRover. Now the site's called Earthglance. I don't know the name of the person (or persons) who runs it but I copied some images. The site has all manner of fantastic things but for now I just want to show highways.

The brilliant Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky includes some photos of highways in his collection based on the theme of oil, oil products, and oil production. You kind of need to see the images at full size to get what he's doing - the images are huge, human scaled. I bought Burtynsky's books as a student even though they aren't cheap. I left one, on quarries, in the wrapping because it's such a gorgeous thing I don't want to unwrap it until I have a satisfactory place to put it. Here are some of his highway shots.

I'll end with a few I can't give proper credit for. I saw them on the internet sometime and DL'd them because they caught my eye. They have been screensavers and wallpapers over the years.

I also have a thing for power lines, particularly the ones hung from wood poles but I'll save that for another post. Sorry about not being able to credit the last set the way the photographers deserve.