STUDY IN RUST

With the weather finally getting warmer, recently I ventured out with my camera looking for something to shoot and stumbled across a metal sculpture outside the entrance to a building that was part of what had been the Schlitz brewery.  The brewery had closed years ago and the cluster of brewery buildings had fallen into disrepair until it was successfully converted to an office park several years ago.  Here is the sculpture, which stands perhaps 20 feet tall.

Not particularly impressive, but what caught my eye was the complex of rust circling the sculpture about 18 inches above the base.

Embarrassingly, even though I took a number of shots of the rust that first time, I wound up coming back another three times in an attempt to capture the texture as an abstract.  The rusted metal featured a number of defects--scratches and patches--that I didn't notice at first but that I felt were creating a distraction.  In short, there were a lot of wasted shots (nothing new there) that drew me back three more times, hoping to finally get it right.

The sheet metal of the sculpture was wrapped in a cylinder and the seam was then welded.  Here are a couple of shots that feature that weld.  I had tried setting the seam in the center but felt it worked better off to the side.

The remainder of the "keeper" shots featured one particular irregularity in the texture of the rust.  Here they are, generally in order of closeup.

Some of the shots for this post were made handheld, which necessitated ramping up the ISO to minimize motion blur.  For the last few images in this post, though, I did use a tripod and also employed my macro lens to maximize detail.

I realize that these shots are almost purely abstract, but I liked the complexity of the textures as well as the earth tones.

John