Wheels

Some black and white photos I took at the Whitehead Railway Museum yesterday. Feel free to comment, or suggest how I could have improved the composition or processing. All thoughts welcome, (good or bad)!

K-70 and the 16-85 mm lens, hand held.












I deliberatly positioned the spoke through the centre of the other wheel. - perhaps it would have been better to have shown the centre of it?

As a retired railway engineer I always like photos such as these and over the years have photographed quite a few wheel sets myself for Doncaster railway works. Looks an interesting museum.

Black and white always works well and I especially like number 2 and 3. With number 1 I find the handrail and cloth on the right distracting and would try a square crop to just focus on the wheel set.

#3 is the pick of the bunch for me, also agree with Paul above re the cloth and handrail being distracting.

Chris

I agree with the comments above, except that the main distraction for me in #1 is the perspective distortion of the nearby pair of wheels, which feels quite disconcerting!

Philip

Thanks for your comments, much appreciated. In the first image I was trying to get more than just the wheelset. But as you say, the rail and cloth do distract. We had to put in the rails round several machines a few years ago after an inspection by the HSE!
I've cropped it here - just a little wider than square.




It's taken at 16 mm which has given the distortion - I doubt if I could have got further back to reduce that. (I rather like the distortion!)

Now in my opinion that has totally transformed the image. The crop gives a great impression of the size of the wheelset and given the black and white conversion with the spot on exposure and focusing jumps out at you.

Much better crop

I like them.

Thanks for your inputs, you are all right! It is better.

Like all of these Antony - personally I prefer the original version of the 1st shot - Yes the cloth may be a little distracting but the format of the image works better and all that extra machinery visible as your eye walks away from the main subject is so interesting. Keep em coming

Yes, the first one depends on whether we want a portrait of the wheels, or the wheels in their engineering environment. So, either picture "works"....