Machinist’s Cabinet

(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 98mm, ISO 3200, 7 Exposure HDR @ f/16)

The Armington & Sims machine shop at Greenfield Village is a great place for lovers of old tools and machinery. I also like the variety of old wooden items they have in the shop. This picture shows a cabinet which is used to contain a variety of small parts. The cabinet sits behind a railing which made it tricky to get a good shot. I ended up taking this at a slight angle to the cabinet when my intention was to shoot it straight on. As a result, the image had just a bit of skew to it that I didn’t care for so I ended up making some perspective corrections in Photoshop. This end of the building was rather dark and the outside light didn’t help much. I didn’t have a remote control for my camera with me so I was manually taking the brackets. The D700 has the ability to shoot a sequence of brackets by just holding down the shutter, but when the brackets take several seconds to shoot, plus a matching several seconds of noise reduction processing, holding the button for all 7 images is a bit difficult, and just begs to introduce additional vibration in the shot. To avoid this to some extent, I bumped the ISO to 3200. This at least kept my longer brackets to a manageable length. Next time I go I’ll make sure I have my cordless remote and I’ll have an easier time getting the brackets I want.

As mentioned, some of the processing involved doing some perspective correction. For this I typically just use Free Transform and skew rather than using Lens Correction. I took the images into Photomatix and did most of the work in that tool. After processing the brackets, I boosted the local contrast a bit more using Topaz Adjust. Some final sharpening and a bit of edge darkening in Lightroom completed the image. By way of comparison, a mid-bracket version of the sequence is shown below.

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Copyright © 2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.