Images and Notes » Mechanical

Utilities

James Howe — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:06:06 +0000

(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 250mm, ISO 640, 1/500 @ f/16)

This image shows a couple of gas meters located on the side of a building next to the office where I work. I’ve always liked the way these meters look in strong light. I like the look of the yellow pipe agains the gray metal siding and I like the shadow patterns created by the sidelight. I’ve seen this image in my head for months but I never bothered to take a picture of it until just recently.

When I processed the shot, my goal was to intensify the color and contrast, since that is what motivated me to take the picture in the first place. My goal wasn’t to necessarily produce what was really there, but instead to produce what my mind saw. Raw images are by their nature a bit flat and you can see from below that the out-of-camera shot really didn’t have much color or contrast. I primarily used Topaz Simplify and some Color Efex Pro 4 to deepen the colors and bring more contrast to the image. The Topaz wiped out some of the details in the meters so I used a layer mask to bring back items such as the number dials, the name plates and the screw heads, any place where I thought that detail was more important.

Always interested in hearing what you think, please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

Gears

James Howe — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:04:56 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 145mm, ISO 800, 7 exposures @ f/5.6)

When the weather starts to get worse, I like to take the time to visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum houses a great collection of ‘industrial’ artifacts and they are quite reasonable about photography. One of the areas that I like to visit is the section on power generation. The museum has a great collection of generators from very old to more modern. I’m just attracted to the large scale and interesting mechanical details of these machines.

The shot above is was created from a 7 exposure HDR originally processed using Photomatix. Normally I like what the tonemapping process does to metal, but for this image it just didn’t work. After sitting on the image for several months, I took another look at it and decided to see what it would look like in black and white. I used Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the conversion and after flipping through some of the presets, I selected one of the ‘noir’ settings and then made further adjustments. I played with the contrast and grain to create a nice gritty image which I thought suited the subject. (The image below shows the normally exposed shot, not the tonemapped HDR.)

Always happy to hear your feedback.

The Old Windmill

James Howe — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:01:05 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm @250mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/250 sec @f/11)

On my way to visit my parents a few days ago I noticed this old windmill at a nearby farm. I don’t know what it is, but I really like old machinery, especially if it is rusty or crusty, so I had to stop and take a few pictures. None of the shots were particularly outstanding, but I liked this one the best of the lot. I initially thought about leaving this as a color image since I like the color combination of the rusty orange and the blue sky, but in the end I went with an antique sepia toned look courtesy of Silver Efex Pro.

As always, your comments and feedback are appreciated. Simply leave them below.

Eclipse Windmill – Saline, Michigan

James Howe — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:20:20 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 220mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/125 sec @f/11)

With a turn to nicer weather yesterday, I decided to go out for a drive to look for interesting subjects to shoot. I was sort of in the mood for things old and rusty, but I didn’t really come across anything which struck my fancy. Heading home, I drove by an old train depot in Saline, Michigan which has been converted to a historical museum. I have driven past this location many times and had never paid it much attention. On this day, however, I noticed a couple of cool elements, one of which was this large wooden windmill. This is a 10ft diameter windmill which is similar to an 18ft windmill which was originally installed at the site. According to the museum’s web site, “The Eclipse was once the most popular of all wooden windmills. It was painted an unusual shade of red and green, colors described by windmill writer, T. Lindsay Baker, as “cow patty green with buzzard blood red tips.” All I know is that I liked the pattern created by the blades. Even though the color is unique, I decided to go with black & white to draw the eye to the patterns rather than the color.

Thoughts?

Gears

James Howe — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 22:00:33 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300 at 70mm, ISO 800, 8 exposure HDR @ f/4.5)

If you have been following my blog for any length of time you should know by now that I enjoy photographing mechanical things. There is something about old, analog technology which I find fascinating. Perhaps it’s the texture of old metal, perhaps it’s the color, and sometimes it’s just the shear size of the thing. This object in this image had all of those things. This picture was taken at theHenry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum has a great section of large generators and steam driven machines and every time I visit there I’m drawn to that area. I don’t recall exactly what this picture is showing, I just remember really liking the way the gears looked.

The image was created in Photomatix and Photoshop from 9 different exposures. I did initial processing in Photomatix and did the final work in Photoshop. The Photoshop work included added a bit more micro-contrast with Topaz Adjust, and changing the color just a bit by creating a black and white layer using Silver Efex Pro and backing off on the opacity. The shot below shows a middle exposure from my HDR sequence.

Comments?

[Click the main image to view it in lightbox mode]

Dark Cutting Oil

James Howe — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:52:14 +0000

(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.

Locomotive Brass

James Howe — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:08:37 +0000

(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:

Machine Shop

James Howe — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:56:30 +0000

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.

Richardson Oil Pump

James Howe — Mon, 03 May 2010 00:29:05 +0000

(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!

Light Bulb Machine

James Howe — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:50:52 +0000

(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?