(Nikon D700, Nikon 16mm Fisheye, ISO 200, Exposure 1/8000 @ f/2.8)

With fall in the air and lacking something new to post I thought I would post this shot I took last year at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Greenfield Village was created by Henry Ford, so it’s not surprising that the Model T and other old Ford automobiles should be prominently displayed. The museum offers rides in some of the older cars. This visit occurred in mid November on a wonderful Indian summer day. It was getting later in the day and the streets of the village were becoming empty. The less crowded village streets became a nice background to the old Ford automobiles that were still tooling around the village that day.

Processing the image was fairly straight-forward. I wanted to emphasize the car and add a bit of vintage feeling to the shot so I added a fairly strong vignette. I also liked the way the vignette worked with curvature of the image created by the fisheye lens. I used the Shadow/Highlight layer in Photoshop to bring back some details in the sky. The rest of the changes were done in Lightroom and involved mostly adjusting the blacks and adding a bit of fill light in spots.

Please feel free to leave comments and feedback below.

Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved

(Nikon D700, 105mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/60 sec @ f/16)

I took this picture of a 1933 Plymouth hood ornament during the 2011 Motor Muster held at Greenfield Village. The gentleman who owned the car gave me some information on the history and evolution of Plymouth hood ornaments. The 1933 had the flying figure and by 1934 they had switched to a stylized sailing ship. The key bit of information was that the 1933 ornament actually used gold in the medallion. True or not I thought the ornament was pretty cool. I took the shot with a 105mm macro lens that I had rented. I have a couple other shots which used a more open aperture, but the field of focus was too thin. I closed it down to f16 for this shot and managed to get more of the ornament in focus. Sometimes razor thin DOF looks cool, but for this sort of shot I prefer to see more detail.

Processing of the image was fairly simple. The first thing I did was give the image more of a square crop. There was too much dark space at the top of the image which didn’t really add anything of value. Similarly there was a dark corner in the bottom right that also didn’t really add anything. After cropping I used a HSL layer in Photoshop to remove some of the green and blue from the reflections of the trees and sky on the hood and used a layer mask to restore the color to the medallion. In general when I’m shooting cars outside, I’ll try to remove some of the color from any chrome. I prefer that my chrome be more silver than whatever color is being reflected in it.

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

(Nikon D700, 105mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/30 sec @ f/3.0)

I have this thing for anything old, mechanical or metal. When I was at Greenfield Village this past weekend for their annual Motor Muster, I had the pleasure of seeing many things which fit that description. One of the coolest places in the museum (in my opinion) is the Armington & Sims machine shop. The shop has a great collection of original machine shop tools and is actually a functioning job shop for items needed at the museum. I was using a Nikon 105mm Macro lens that I had rented from LensPro To Go and I made a pass through the shop to see if I could get some interesting images. One of my favorites from this trip is this shot of some tool which had a great collection of gears. I didn’t have my tripod with me that day, but if I did I would have taken some brackets for an HDR image. The shop is too dark to take handheld exposures.

Processing of the image involved using a square crop to focus more on the machine itself. I didn’t like the really bright area at the top of the original image and I liked the combination of the curved gears inside of the square frame. The remainder of processing was done in Silver Efex Pro2 where I tried to bring out the detail in the metal.

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

(Nikon D700, Nikon 105mm f2.3 Macro, ISO 200, Exposure 1/30 sec @ f/16)

So, I went to the annual Motor Muster at Greenfield Village and came back with a shot of a … radio. Actually I do have some pictures of cars, but I think I’m hitting a block on my car photography. At this show I saw many of the same cars I saw last year (and the year before), and while I enjoy looking at them, I’m finding it harder to come up with interesting ways to shoot them. It’s hard to get a good shot of the entire car because there are generally people in the way so I tend to focus on details. However, after shooting details for so long I find myself mentally rejecting shots before I even take them because I remember taking something similar in the past. Anyway, the show was fun even if I didn’t get a large number of ‘keeper’ shots.

This image shows a 1937 Silvertone Console Radio. The radio was purchased in 1937 at a Sears in Highland Park, Michigan. The radio accompanied a 1937 car (whose make and model I don’t recall). I took this shot because I really liked the Art Deco style of the radio.

Processing was done in two stages. I did some initial work in Lightroom to increase the blacks and overall exposure and some minor cropping. The rest was done with Silver Efex Pro2 in Photoshop.

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

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 125mm, ISO 800, Exposure 2 sec @f/16)

I didn’t really know how to title this post because I’m not exactly sure what this thing is. All I know about it is that it is some sort of machine used in the maintenance of railway cars and/or engines. I took this picture at Greenfield Village last fall (to see the machine in context, check out this blog post I made a few months ago.) The Village has an old railroad roundhouse which is both an exhibit and a place for worker to work on the rolling stock owned by the museum. I was originally planning on created an HDR image out of this subject, and I took 9 exposures while I was there to do it, but when I actually processed the images in Photomatix, I didn’t care for what came out. Instead I did something much simpler. I used Topaz Adjust to bring out some more detail in the metal. I think it did a really nice job in this regard.

Love to hear your thoughts, feedback or questions. Leave them below!

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

(Nikon D700, 16mm, ISO 3200, Exposure 1/60 sec @ f/8.0)

I was looking through my Lightroom catalog for something to post to the blog when I noticed this shot. Originally I wasn’t excited about it. I liked it, but I didn’t think it was special. Still, there was something about it that I found attractive so I spent a little time with some post processing to see what I might come up with. The shot is from Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Lab building located in Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. This was pretty much a grab shot as I walked through the building. I bumped the ISO and stuck my camera into this little room and took a couple of shots. I had my tripod, so I could have set up and taken multiple shots for an HDR, but it was getting late in the day and I was getting lazy. I think the thing that appeals to me is what the fisheye does to the lines in the image. I like the strong curve of the doorframe as well as the curved lines created by the paneled walls.

For processing, I initially used Lightroom to reduce the noise in the image. I shot this as 3200 and while the noise wasn’t awful, it was pretty easy to clean up with Lightroom. I then went into Photoshop and used Silver Efex Pro to do the conversion. I again stepped through the presets and came across one that I had created which I call Holga Panatomic X. It’s Nik’s standard Holga preset, which is somewhat dark with a strong vignette, but customized to use the ISO 32 Panatomic X film type. I also added a bit of sepia tone as well. The fisheye creates a nice circular feeling to the image and I think the extra bit of vignette just adds to it and helps bring the focus to the center of the image rather than the edges.

What do you think? Comments always welcome.

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

(Nikon D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 200, HDR 7 exposures @ f/16)

One of the best things about living in Michigan is when you get a warm, indian summer day in late October. The sun is starting to hang a bit lower in the sky and the afternoon light is terrific, particularly when coupled with blue sky and red or yellow leaves on the trees. Last weekend I spent an afternoon at Greenfield Village and the day just got better as the day went on. It was getting close to closing time at the museum and I was walking toward the entrance when I passed by the quarter-size replica of Ford’s original Mack Ave. plant. Something about the light on the building, the leaves in the tree and the clouds in the sky just compelled me to take this shot. I popped on my rental 16mm fisheye and set up my tripod to capture shots for an HDR image.

Processing consisted of taking the 7 exposures into Photomatix 4. It was breezy that day so I took advantage of the semi-manual method of anti-ghosting to remove the ghosting on the leaves. It worked fairly well. I only focused on the leaves in the main part of the image, if you look towards the edges I’m sure you will see blur/ghosting artifacts but with the fisheye it’s not a big part of the image. The Photomatix processing left the image a bit flat from a contrast perspective, so I finished things up in Photoshop with a bit of a bump in saturation and added some additional contrast using a curves layer. Overall I’m pleased with how it came out. Click the image to see it larger.

Your comments and feedback are always appreciated.

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

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 195mm, ISO 800, HDR – 7 exposures @ f/5.6)

If you look through a portfolio of my images you might notice that I enjoy taking pictures of old, mechanical things. I just really like the design elements that were often used in older technolgy. It seemed as if the machine was as much art as it was functional. I think this picture from the Edison Illuminating Company building at Greenfield Village is a good example. The picture is a crank wheel attached to an electric generator. I believe this particular generator came from Edison’s power plant located on Pearl Street in New York City. The wheel serves a simple purpose, to turn something, and it could have been made with simple spokes, but this one used spokes which create a star pattern which caught my eye as I was looking for elements to shoot inside the station.

The image was created from 7 exposures using the tone mapping capabilities of Photomatix. After getting the basic look, I was able to bring out additional detail by using Topaz Adjust. The combination of the two really brings out the details in the metal. Compare the HDR to one of the single exposures below. While I probably could have used Adjust on just this one image and gotten good results, I think starting with the HDR image created a better image.

Comments or thoughts?

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

(Nikon D700, 70-300 at 300mm, ISO 800, Exposure 1/125 sec @ f/5.6)

In yesterday’s post I showed the exterior of the Edison Illuminating Company building located inside Greenfield Village. This shot comes from the interior. Edison’s power plants produced DC power, and the power wasn’t very strong and didn’t transmit well over long distances. The further you were away from the power plant, the less power you got. The light bulbs in the building at Greenfield village run at about 40 watts, which is about the intensity of light you would have received from that plant if you were nearby. Of course, the bulbs actually lasted a long time at that power.

This image has had no special processing other than some minor sharpening. I used my 70-300 zoom at a relatively wide aperture to create the dark and blurry background.

Comments?

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

(Nikon D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 800, 7 exposure HDR @ f/16)

I’ve only got a couple more days before I have to send my lens rental back so I took advantage of the wonderful weather we had this weekend to once again visit Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The day started out somewhat cloudy, but the temperature was pleasant and as the afternoon wore on, the clouds moved on. As I was walking by this building I noticed that the clouds were starting to break up and make some interesting formations. The sun was also getting lower in the sky and was adding some additional warmth to the building. I had been shooting with a longer lens, but I decided to switch back to the fisheye to see what I might be able to capture. I had my tripod with me so I decided to shoot some brackets for an HDR image. In order to make this shot, I had to crouch down very low to the ground and try to get everything lined up. I could have backed up, but I wanted the closer shot. Other than HDR processing using Photomatix, the picture is pretty much as the camera took it. I cropped just a bit from the sides, but nothing significant.

The building itself is a one-quarter replica of the Edison Illuminating Company’s Station A, the first power plant in the city of Detroit. Henry Ford worked at the Edison Illumination Company as a steam engineer eventually rising to chief engineer for this plant in 1893. This building contains some very cool generators, including one generator which came from the Edison plant located on Pearl Street in Manhattan. I was told that for a while this plant actually provided some power to the museum, but years ago the government deemed the operation unsafe (I don’t know the reason) and the steam engine and generators no longer run. It’s a shame because it would be really cool to see these things run, if only as a demonstration.

Comments?

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