Machinery by TJ

Whenever I think of machinery I always harp back to the golden age of steam and the industrial revolution. It is one of my favourite periods of history. When coming to choose a subject to photograph for this topic I quickly ruled out modern machinery and thought about discarded rusty agricultural machinery, but I quickly came back to steam. How I now wished we could have done this topic in the summer and I could have gone and hunted out steam engines galore at steam rallies. However one of my favourite toys as a child was a miniature working steam engine, which I would spend hours outside playing with in the garden shed with my dad. I dug this out at my mum's house and had the added bonus of trying out my new photography backdrop and indoor photography lights. The challenge I set myself was to try an bring out the essence of machinery,  taking away the "toy" element. The resulting image was shot using a macro close up setting to give an illusion of a greater size and a result achieved a nice depth of field. I simply turned the image into grayscale, sharpened it and finally adjusted the brightness and contrast.

My other efforts show how I zoomed in on the piston, which although pleasing gave no indication as to what exactly I was photographing. I tried editing the photos in old Cyonatype format, but felt the grayscale worked better. I also came across a a piece of agricultural equipment stored in a barn of my work travels which lacked a "story".