Sunday, November 20, 2011

The Beauty of Destruction, part 7 - Old No.3





Camera App: BracketMode

Additional Apps used for processing:
ProHDR - to create a HDR picture from the shots made with BracketMode. Hower, I later discovered the HDR picture being partially unsharp which was the result of too much movement as I made the photos with BracketMode. So I decided to redo my picture, this time using only the darker photo of the set made because it was sharp all over.
SimplyHDR - to enhance the HDR picture created with ProHDR. If you want to create an HDR picture with an app that works with a set of photos make sure you don't saturate too much or your picture will look extremely over-saturated if you load it in yet another HDR app that works with single pictures, such as SimplyHDR. I was already much satisfied with the first result SimplyHDR came up with after loading my picture so I accept it the way it was and saved it.
Grungetastic - to experiment with because my the HDR version looked too boring to me. Testing various settings I finally stuck with Gritty 2 which I adapted to my likes. I pulled almost all sliders back to the left for zero effect except but for the tone slider which I left in its position. But Grunge 1, Grunge 2 and Papers had been set to full left and Borders had been set to No Border.
Blender - to blend my HDR with the Grunge version in Overlay mode, 50/50. Nice result, saved it.
PhotoForge - to create a version with High Pass filter because I wanted to add a little more sharpness. Sharpness could also have been added in Grungetastic but I haven't tested that feature yet.
Blender again - to sharpen my picture by blending it with the High Pass version in Overlay mode, 50/50 settings. Usually 50/50 looks right. To my taste more than 50% is overdoing the effect a bit.
After saving that result I was loading it again in Blender together with the HDR version before applying the Grunge effect because the picture looked a bit too greenish to me. I reduced that effect by setting the slider to 27% only, HDR loaded on the left side, greenish version loaded on the right side. Now I only needed a frame.
Grungetastic - I loaded my picture again in Grungetastic because I wanted a particular frame that I liked. Again I applied the Gritty 2 effect, pulling this time ALL of the sliders to the left, including the Tone slider, but for border I was choosing Border #13 (counted from left to right).
TouchRetouch - for minor touch-up. There had been a bright red little something laying underneath the wheel, disturbing the overall picture a bit so I removed it.
A+Signature - for the copyright watermark.

My latest picture from the "Beauty of Destruction" series shows wheel #3 of the now wrecked old electric locomotive #3609 of the National Railroad Company of Luxembourg, SNCFL. You can still see a number "3" pained in white on the wheel's glide bearing box. Attached to that box was also the speed gauge, a part that transformed the mechanical information received through the revolutions of the axle into electric tension to feed the Hasler-Bern speed indicator with in the cockpit. Also well visible are the wheel rim markings as broad yellow stripes (now bleached after long time weathering). The wheels on this type of engine had not been made in one piece but consisted of a wheel body and a rim that was shrunken onto the body in the workshops. For this purpose, the rim was heated up to a certain temperature because heating metal means the material will expand in its dimensions, hence the inner diameter got bigger and the wheel body could be inserted. Then the completed wheel was slowly cooled down, the rim shrunk again and got fixed in that way to the wheel's body. The reason for this type of railroad wheel simply was cost reduction because it was less expensive to replace a set of rims than replacing a complete axle with full body wheels. But like the advantage of this type of wheel was it to easily shrink a rim onto a wheel body, the disadvantage was that the rim could loosen again especially during a prolonged application of the brakes. Then the cast steel brake pads heated the rim up through friction. In the result the rim was loosening and turning on the wheel body. Under extreme conditions a wheel could be falling apart, with the certainly disastrous result of a heavy derailment of a train. To avoid this, the engineer had to check the markings on the wheel especially when preparing an engine for the day. The greatest railroad disaster as the result of a broken rim was the derailment and crash of the German high speed ICE 844 train "Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen" in 1998. The link goes to a video report on YouTube taken from a German TV documentation. I added this one because I couldn't find a suitable English report. But even if you don't understand German, the pictures show it all. In case of the ICE884 the train did not derail because a rim was overheating but because there had been fissures in it which had not been discovered due to technical inspections not being made.

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