Farming Relics: Old, Rusty, Going nowhere anytime soon

I took this set just outside of Collie on the Collie-Williams Road. Even though they were basically just taken as ‘snaps’ some of them worked out much better than I expected them to. Due to the surrounds with roads, fences, water pipe, and the old enemy of all photographers, power lines, I did not think these would turn out that well. But the strong gold and amber effect from the low setting sun on the rust and the gravel gives them a sort of glowing warm feel.

Okay. The bitumen road with the white line does distract from the old tractor pictures a bit—but really there was no way I could avoid it.

Clicking on any image will load up an uncompressed 1800 pixel wide version from SmugMug into a new browser window or tab (depending how you have your browser configured). You might ask why 1800 pixels wide. Well I figure that most serious people looking at pictures will have a 1920x1200 monitor as a minimum. So an 1800 pixel wide picture will just about fill the width of the monitor.

Note also that the images shown below appear a little darker here than the larger source images in SmugMug due to the consequence of reducing the size by a third to fit them into the blog.

These first two images were developed from RAW using DxO. The last two images were not take as RAW and were simply post-edited in Photoshop Elements to crop, resize, and sharpen (un-sharpen).

All these pictures were taken at 1600 ISO on my, now old, Pentax K-5.

In the large version of the following picture you can see obvious low-light noise, especially in the trees in the background. But in the small compressed version below the digital noise is not so obvious.

For those not picking it up the sun is down behind those trees directly over the streering wheel of the tractor—which makes this a relatively challenging shot to get right.

I love how well the Pentax K-5 has handled the light depth in this picture. Okay. The sky is basically totally blown out, beyond recovery. But apart from that the K-5 has done pretty well. And unlike the first two pictures which were take as RAW, this picture was taken as JGP so it lost a bit of unrecoverable depth when it was saved.

Following is a shot from the other side of the tractor above. This time without the issues of shooting into the setting sun. Again, I love how the golden ambers of the setting sun are lifting up the various hues of the rust.