Back At The Machine Shop

I had a chance to go back to the machine shop today. Apart from hoping to find more images, I wanted to reshoot the wood box of chucks and shapes that I'd shown you before. I hadn't noticed at the time that with the box against the wall, the bottom left corner was extremely dark. Attempts to lighten the corner just resulted in noise and linear artifacts from too much manipulation. The image I showed you resulted from massive cloning of the shapes into the dark area thus minimizing it, but I knew that a large print would probably show the flaws, and overall I just wasn't happy with it.

Today I hauled out the box and sat it on a counter where the light was better balanced. I then reorganized the shapes to hide some junk on the bottom of the box and to place the important shapes in better positions. I was somewhat limited in my options since anything that rose out of the box would suffer from depth of field problems and it was my intention to stitch this image and the idea of both stitching and doing a focus blend was not appealing. I played with the shapes for a while before coming up with what seemed pleasing. I'd have preferred that rectangle under the handle to have been on an angle instead of against the edge, but every time I did that, other problems occurred so I abandoned the idea - a matter of the lesser evils.

The second image was a major find in a corner of the machine shop I'd not checked out before. A series of cylinders of steel were sitting on top of a cabinet behind a milling machine. I tried a few angles but this was the best. I used helicon focus to increase depth of field, though a view camera stopped down would have worked well too but with some blurring in the background which might in fact have been attractive. Anyway, I'm happy with it as it is.

The machine shop has turned out to be a major find for me - more pleasing images than in a long time.