(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 95mm, ISO 1600, Exposure 1/250 sec @f/5.6)

The image above was taken on a recent visit to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I went for the annual Motor Muster, but spent some time touring the various exhibits. I’ve previously posted images from the Machine Shop, and this is another one from the same shop. My goal in this shot was to try and capture the feeling of the machine, gritty and oily. You can see metal shavings from the cutter, but what I really liked was the can of oil. The title of the image comes from the writing on the can ‘Dark Cutting Oil’.

As you can see below, the raw image was in color, but I converted it to black & white in Lightroom. Along the way I added a bit of vignette and did some toning of the black & white image itself. I will say that I really like in the color version is the look of the oil can itself. I like the brown, oily patina on the can and I don’t think the black & white has the same feeling. I’m also debating about cropping some from the top to eliminate some of the bright window and focus the eye more on what I think is the subject of the image.

Interested in hearing what you think.

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

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 270mm, ISO 2500, Exposure 1/125 sec @f/5.6)

This image was taken at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan during the recent Motor Muster car show. The village has some great exhibits, one of them being a railroad roundhouse. One of the permanent items in the roundhouse is an old steam engine. The engine has wonderful brass detail, particularly in the control area.

Processing was done in Lightroom and included increasing the blacks, reducing the exposure just a bit, an increase in clarity and some noise removal. The noise wasn’t terrible out of camera and Lightroom was able to clean things up nicely. The original capture can be seen below:

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

Machine Shop

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm @ 100mm, ISO 1600, Exposure 1/30 sec @f/5.6)

This past weekend I visited Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan to see the annual ‘Motor Muster’ car show. I got some nice pictures of cars and other items (which I will be posting over time) but I also spent some time in some of the historical buildings which comprise the Village. One of the buildings houses the ‘Armington and Sims’ Machine Shop and Foundry. This building contains a working machine shop with lots of interesting machining tools. When items are needed around the village, they still use this shop to fabricate them. The picture above shows one of the various machining tools found in the building. All of the tools are driven by belts which are hooked up to one driving machine.

The shop is fairly dark and I was using a telephoto lens to get some visual compression. I bumped the ISO of my D700 to 1600 but still ended up shooting at 1/30th of a second. I experimented with adding a bit of flash to the shot, so I set the camera on manual to capture some ambient light and then use the on-camera flash to add a bit of fill. Processing the image included several changes in Lightroom, including warming the image a bit and enhancing the contrast. As I worked with the image I thought that it might look good using a ‘Simplify’ treatment using my Topaz Simplify plug-in. I like the effect it has on metal.

The image below shows the raw, out of camera image for comparison.

Please feel free to leave comments below. I appreciate any feedback you might have.

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

Oil Pump

(Nikon D700, 50mm, ISO 6400, Exposure 1/125 sec @f/2.0)

One of the nice places to visit in Southeastern Michigan is the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum contains a wonderful collection of artifacts, mostly centered around manufactured items. One of my favorite areas of the museum to photography is the area which contains a collection of old generators. These things were originally installed in manufacturing plants and most are quite huge and quite impressive. This particular image shows just a small portion of a huge generator which used to be installed in a Ford Motor Company automobile plant in Highland Park, Michigan. The item shows an oil pump used to feed oil to this huge piece of machinery.

The museum has typical museum lighting, which is to say that it is quite dark. I could have used flash, but with the metal surface it really wouldn’t look good. Perhaps if I were using a giant softbox some interesting lighting might be possible, but that really wasn’t practical. If you look at the EXIF data you will see that this was shot at ISO 6400. I recently purchased a Nikon D700 and one of the reasons I purchased it was for its high ISO capability. Overall I think the quality of the image is quite nice, but when I shot it, my intent was to add a bit of processing to it to make it look less like a photograph and more like a painting.

The primary bit of work was to use Topaz Adjust and Topaz Simplify to add some additional contrast and create the painterly look. I then masked out part of the image to keep the pump itself, along with the writing on the pump, sharp. The rest of the image was allowed to go ‘fuzzy’. For more details on the processing, along with some before, during and after versions of the image, check out my tutorial post at imagenotebook.jameshowephotography.com

Please feel free to leave your comments!

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

Light Bulb Machine

(Nikon D700, 50mm, ISO 2000, Exposure 1/125 sec @f/1.8)

This is another shot I took at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The picture shows a machine which was used to manufacture light bulbs. The museum lighting is pretty dark and I didn’t have my tripod with me so I bumped the ISO to 2000 to get this shot. While the noise levels even at this ISO aren’t too bad, my thought when I took this was to create more of a ‘artsy’ image with heavy processing using Topaz Simplify. I was more interested in the shapes in the shot than trying to capture the machine in a more realistic fashion.

Processing on was primarily done using Topaz Simplify. They have a preset called ‘Buzz Sim’ which does a really nice job of smoothing out the image in a very interesting manner. Any noise in the image is effectively smoothed and in some cases adds additional character to the image, similar to a painting, but with more detail.

Comments?

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