Posted on May.26, 2011, under black and white

(Nikon D700, 50mm, ISO 200, 5 exposures @ f/8)

On my way home from my visit to Fayette, Ohio (and Hal’s Garage) I headed up highway 109 towards Michigan. Just before I got to the Michigan border, I came across this grain elevator at a farm. What caught my eye was how rusty the thing was. Most of these things are really shiny aluminum, but not this one. The road didn’t have a really wide shoulder and there was a bit of a drop off to a ditch so I didn’t have a lot of room to pull over and get a good shot. I ended up pulling over and shooting this from my car window.

I shot five exposures, thinking that I might want to create an HDR, but after looking at the tonemapped image (seen below), I decided to see what it might look like in black and white. I didn’t really like the truck that was parked along the right side of the image, so I tried to find some way to minimize it. I’ve been attracted to the various ‘Antique Plate’ effects in Silver Efex Pro 2 and found that using a reverse vignette did a nice job of eliminating the truck and drawing more attention to the main subject. I played with the contrast and structure to get the level of detail that I wanted, and ended up with the image you see above.

Copyright © 2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.

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