E is for Electric Wires

For the purposes of this month's AtoZchallenge, E is for electric wires, also known as power lines . I love electricity. I wouldn’t want to be without it or deprive anyone else of it. But it does have something I don’t like – wires and poles. 

 As an amateur photographer who loves taking  pictures of trees and the sky, those electrical wires do have a way of ruining my potential pictures. In this respect, artists who paint have an advantage. They don’t have to paint in the wires they see. Or they can be creative in using them as they see fit, as Barbara Rosenthal, one of our local artists, did in this picture titled “Gaviota Line Dance,” which she displayed along with another picture with wires at the Phantom of the Arts Exhibit in Paso Robles, 2012. 

I am not yet, however, skillful enough with photo editing software to remove wires from photographs, so I try not to include them in the first place, if possible. It’s not always possible. An example is a Victorian home I photographed in Yreka, California. It didn’t matter where you stood or which direction you shot from, you could not escape the wires. It almost seemed, from a photographer’s point of view, that the house was wrapped in electrical wires.

The same is true of one of our most historic churches in Templeton – Bethel Lutheran Church. It’s a landmark, and it’s almost impossible to get a view of it without any wires.

I love the trees which line the streets near downtown Paso Robles. They often have gorgeous sunsets or cloud formations behind them. It’s bad enough that I have to include house tops, but inevitably there’s also a wire crossing some part of the picture, or an electric pole that looks out of place in the midst of a nature shot.

The only place I find poles and wires useful in scenery is when they act as perching places for my feathered friends. This high voltage pole is on Anderson  Road in Paso Robles off Highway 46 West.

I took this last picture in my back yard. There seemed to be a bird convention that day. They crowded the wire and also the tree below. When I took this, several had already flown away while I was focusing.

So while I love all the blessings electricity brings to my life, I do wish it appeared more often without the poles and wires over the streets and along country roads. Sometimes they just seem out of place.

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