Machine Shop

Stiff and sore after too much tennis I begged off hiking in the mountains and agreed with my friend Robin that we would go for coffee, then head down to see his show of black and white images at Alliance Francais, pictures of Paris and surrounds. Robin had several nice images and all photographs were richly printed (he uses a REAL darkroom). One in particular I just loved and I'm hoping he will give me the chance to scan the negative or print and show you the image some time. Anyway, after that we headed to an old part of town and parked a few blocks off 'main street', thinking we'd walk back.

The spot we parked though was just across the road from an old machine shop that had been all closed up the last time I'd been there, but today was wide open and with people around. I don't know that I'd have had the nerve to invite myself in but with a friend there for moral support, we both went in and soon found a man who has worked there for 54 years. New owners are starting to spruce the place up and were quite happy to let us photograph the place, warning us to be careful but leaving us to do pretty much whatever we wanted.

Seems this 1919 machine shop has been used as a movie set in the past but today is doing repairs on things like heat exchangers.

Anyway Robin and I had a great time photographing for several hours an I hope to produce several good images. In fact, they are open again tomorrow so I'm heading back in the morning - I had some camera trouble today - first because Canon had repaired my shutter for me and I didn't notice that in doing so they'd cancelled all the settings I'd carefully set up, including using Raw. It also messed up the numbering system on my 2 gig card and it went down and the images couldn't be retrieved till I came home and used photorescue to retrieve the images - very effectively. Later in the day the camera started failing again, this time the shutter wouldn't go off, I'd press to raise the mirror, then the second press just lowered the mirror again and I got an error message. Repeated turning off and pulling the battery didn't fix this, but leaving it alone for 10 minutes did - very odd and not a little creepy.

The second image, of the machine shop is two images blended, one focused on the chain, the other on the background. I did it manually via cut paste and mask in photoshop, thinking that Helicon Focus wouldn't be able to do it. Actually I have just tried it and surprisingly it did a very good job through most of the chain, better than I did, except for a bit of a double exposure look at the bottom of the chain. As this would be an easy edit to the masks for Helicon Focus, the best result would probably be this way - I'm impressed.

Had I not been fiddling with the image blending, this might have been a good shot to try HDR with so the detail in the upper windows wouldn't be blown out. I note some advice from Uwe Steinmuller on Outbackphoto on that subject.