Tag: Mechanical

Utilities

Posted under Mechanical

Utilities

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.


Gears

Posted under Mechanical

Gears

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.


Morning at the Harbor

Posted under Michigan

Spool

On a recent trip to Marquette, Michigan I had an opportunity to walk around the lower harbor early one morning. It was the 5th of July and the Marquette had hosted a 4th of July party down in the harbor area. It was interesting wandering around as volunteers were cleaning up and packing things up from the night before. As I wandered around I walked down one of the roads leading out to the docks. As I walked out I passed a metal building which had these interesting devices attached. They were several feet wide and looked like they would be used to spool something, but I have no idea what. I just liked the way they looked in the morning light.


Gears

Posted under Greenfield Village

Gears

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.


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.


Steampunk-ish

Posted under Greenfield Village

Steampunk-ish

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. 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.


9542 – Take Two

Posted under black and white

9542 - Take Two

I was working through my Lightroom catalog this morning trying to find some shots that I had edited recently. I wanted to export them so I could print them. As I was working through the catalog, I came across an image of two trains that I had taken in the summer of 2007. I had produced a final image that I liked at the time, but when I saw it today I thought I might tweak it a little to come up with something different.


f 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.


Crank Handle

Posted under HDR

Crank Handle

This is another in a series of HDR images that I shot at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Once again the location was the Armington & Sims machine shop. I love the look of the old, oiled, metal of the vintage machinery. I think this type of material really works well with HDR. My goal was to really focus in on one element of the machine, in this case a crank handle, possibly used to operate a vise-like component, but I’m not sure. In comparison with one of the ‘as-shot’ images, I think this shot really brings out the details.


Armington & Sims Machine Shop

Posted under HDR

Armington & Sims Machine Shop

The Armington & Sims machine shop in Greenfield Village was built in 1929. It was named after a maker of steam engines in Providence, Rhode Island. The building houses a working machine shop which would have been used as a ‘job’ shop to build and repair various parts for industry. The shop was originally powered by steam, with the steam engine sending its power to the machinery via a system of belts and pulleys. If you look near the top of the image, you can see a series of pulley wheels and their belts which power the machines to the right. Today the shop it powered by electricity. While primarily an exhibit of what a machine shop would have been like in the day, the shop is still used to produce parts for items needed in the village and museum.