Roundhouse revisited

I recently had a chance to revisit one of my favorite historical landmarks in Manchester.

That day my goal was to boost my depth of field skills and push a couple of "affordable" lenses to their limits.

And I'll admit, I also wanted to keep up with my fearless colleagues who had risked frostbite and hypothermia to capture some gorgeous shots during last week's cold snap.

I found the railroad roundhouse as I had last left her — abandoned, decaying, swathed in graffiti, languishing under the beating of another brutal New York winter. Some of the refuse had been cleared in preparation for a future renovation, but there was still plenty of chaos.

"If this spectacular old girl could talk," I thought. "The stories she could tell."

As I set up bracketed shots to compare with their HDR counterparts, bits and pieces of bygone conversations bounced around in my head: travelers saying goodbye or being welcomed home, railroad workers kibitzing, farmers swapping stories as they loaded crops into boxcars.

I also heard the sounds of drunk teens hurling profanity and laughing at jokes they'd forget before morning. I could hear the clanking of BBs inside aerosol cans and savor the odor of fresh paint. There's such artistry in much of the graffiti — it's so beautiful.

Other tags are profane for the sake of shock and, amusingly, reveal how much the author has to learn about sexuality.

It was a good visit. My lenses showed more muscle than their price tags implied. My depth of field skills notched up a bit. Lightroom helped with disparate lighting extremes. In very few cases did I layer varying exposures of the same image, opting instead to edit the darkest in each series.

HDR images — of which only one is posted here — seemed to be quite unflattering to this grand dame of architecture. I'm not sure if I'll waste the disc space in the future.

Special thanks to fellow photog and friend Regina who forged a trail through the deep snow so we could get to the promised land.