During a photoshoot on a farm, I took a break after my photography session was done and a video crew started covering their part of the visit. I wandered to the back area of the farm and weaved my way through buildings, grain bins and silos to a grove of trees. In the trees were pieces of old, outdated farm equipment. Cultivators, watering tanks, old trailers, plows and other farm implements from the early part of the 1900’s. I’m pretty sure a couple were from days of horse drawn implements. Now they were abandoned and taking on a great coloring of rust and algae. Most were bent or broken beyond repair.
I started composing photos looking at various angles and heights to photograph the implements and equipment. Ideas of the following photos in this post were running through my mind.
A couple times, other people from the video set wandered back to the grove during their break and wondered what I was doing. I’m sure they were questioning why I went from photographing portraits of the farm family, new equipment and the pristine area of this farm to taking photos of junk in a tangle mess of weeds and trees. All I could say when they asked was, “I have an idea”!
I took these images into Photoshop and adjusted the levels and contrast to my liking. I then duplicated the layer. The new top layer I adjusted the saturation of the image, mostly the red and yellow channels until the rust stood out even more. Then changed the blend mode to overlay getting a more contrasty and saturated image. I adjusted my opacity of the top layer to bring down the contrast. In a couple of the images I added a gaussian blur to the image, around the 10 – 15 range. It added a little painterly quality to the image.
“ Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. – Matt Hardy
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