PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When one steps into the past the air should be chalky and the sound disjunct, but here the wheels are still oiled and turning, and the steam is still hissing and purring softly. I watched a man hoist 20 foot lengths of copper tubing out of a bath of hydrochloric acid, the liquid cascading from the far end back into a long tub beneath. The bundle of tubes was then carried out of sight on a giant crane that straddled the building.
The enertia of great wheels keeps them spinning slowly, long after all other wheels have ceased. So it is here where a small amount of large diameter copper tubing is still made using technology put in place during World War II. No trains run here now, and only a few men work the floor. Beyond are other buildings of the complex, silent but for the haunting of pigeons, but its appropriate to start here where the music still plays in what is, as it were, a grand ballroom of another era.
3 comments:
Hi Ted! Too windy to go to the beach; better surf the Net... ;)
Wow! This one is complete...
Blogtrotter Two is waiting for you in Corsica... Enjoy and have a wonderful weekend!!
I love old machinery, it makes us realize people were just as ingenious as they are now. Good shot, I suppose it's HDR. I tried some things out again but I can't get something like this out of photomatix. Probably I need to get a dutch manual, lol.
Trotter - actually this is only about a small corner of the factory shed which is huge, but you're looking at an amazing extruder that takes a chunk of copper about two feet long with a hole through the middle and extrudes it like play dough into a ten foot section of pipe that is then stretched like silly putty to be twenty or more feet long.
Hi Dick. I wish I was certain we were still so ingenious. As to the photo, no, it is not an HDR but a straight shot. If you're using Photoshop, you may want to look at a plug-in called Topaz Adjust. I sometimes use it in combination with Photomatix, but here I'm using it alone.
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