Combine Chute

Ken and I visited Pioneer Acres, after stopping at an abandoned farm. The sky was cloudless and finding images that showed any subtlety was challenging. Why I bent over and peered into the opening of a chute of an old combine I can't explain, but in the shade was this lovely rust and patina composition.

I tried photographing it from a few feet away with the 120 on the Pentax 645Z but apart from having to shade the lens, the shape didn't work. I switched to the 35 mm. which fortunately has a close focus distance and put the camera almost into the chute opening. I stopped down to f22 and accepted that the edges would be out of focus.

In one way, the image is a big cheat. That funny red shape at the top of the image is in fact a flap valve, with grass and sunlight and red. I just wasn't happy with it. I tried blurring it but it just looked blurred - very fake.

Out of curiosity I wondered what Photoshop would make of it if I hugely enlarged the healing brush to the same diameter as the flap and a tad more, and the result was this very attractive shape and colour which I think works very well with the rest of the image which is pretty straight.

Should I have taken it this far - well, I'm really pleased with the result and let's face it, peering up chutes sounds like something for a proctologist, not a photographer - so if it's been altered a tad, well, who's to challenge me.

Construction

I headed out for my walk, but they're installing new storm drains and I popped across the road to check out the equipment. The larger front end loader had caked mud all over the bucket, but the smaller had a cleaner bucket with a nice rust pattern and as I approached a lovely glow from the polished metal.

It started raining and my efforts to record the image as a stitch were different as the rain initially added splotches and by the time I quit, an even sheen on the part of the bucket exposed to the vertical rain.

By the time I finished shooting, exposures were up to 30 seconds as darkness set in.

Buckets and Bumpers

Abstract In Rust

And here's what it looks like at 100%, after blending five images of the top, five of the bottom, then stitching together, cropping and editing.

The crop is about 24X magnification of the full image shown at top. This would print 12 feet across, though it wouldn't stand nose on inspection, still - 12 feet...

Iron

Egg

Half of a mold - in this case, the two parts are about a cubic foot of steel - and you thought the chicken had it hard...

Leather Aprons

I was photographing at a Smithy - and these are the leather aprons worn to protect from burns.