Here’s another picture from my Arizona trip. Back in the day, the only way to cross the Colorado River at Hoover Dam was to drive across the dam itself. Everyone knew this couldn’t last forever, and in 2005 construction was finally started on a bridge across Highway 93. The Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge—the highest concrete arch bridge in the world—was finished in 2010 and here it is, in a shot taken from down near the dam itself:

This is a panoramic photo. I couldn’t fit the bridge into a single shot, so I took two pictures and then stitched them together using Photoshop. However, that produces a bit of a fisheye effect, which requires yet more Photoshop magic:

January 25, 2020 — Hoover Dam, Clark County, Nevada

Not bad! In the slot canyon pictures, a modest amount of fisheye isn’t even visible since the walls of the canyon swoop and curve in the first place. But in a picture like this, where the deck of the bridge is obviously supposed to be flat, it really needs to be corrected.

As usual, however, note that it’s not possible to correct everything at once. The bridge is tolerably straight now, but the Lexus at the bottom right is visibly stretched, as if it were one of those old wide-track Pontiacs. But you probably wouldn’t have noticed it unless I had pointed it out.

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The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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