(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 270mm, ISO 250, Exposure 1/2000 sec @f/5.6)

The image above shows a Stover Windmill which is on permanent display at Michigan’s Greenfield Village. The Village was created by Henry Ford as a place to showcase American industrial achievements. I was visiting the Village to attend their annual ‘Motor Muster’. I’ve been to the Village several times and I have always liked the look of this windmill. It is quite large and I think it looks nice against a blue sky.

The windmill itself was manufactured by the Stover Manufacturing & Engine Company. The company was started in the 1860′s by Daniel C. Stover who invented and manufactured machinery of various kinds. At one point the company was a supplier to Sears Roebuck & Company. The company shut down in 1942

Processing of the image was minimal. As you can see from the original image below, the main change was to create a square crop focusing on the blades of the windmill.

I’m always interested in hearing your feedback.

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.