Tucked in behind the Walmart in North Conway, NH, is a swathe of land that was once the site of a thriving granite quarry. Now it has been swallowed by the forest, but the land is opened to the public (there are great mountain biking and hiking trails here) and if you poke around beneath the old quarried ledge, you will find remnants of the industry: old builidings, cables, evidence of railroad beds, and, perhaps most intriguing, many brooding hulks of old machinery just lying out among the trees. And, as you can imagine, since this stuff was designed to quarry and turn huge pieces of grainite, the machinery is pretty massive.
Many of the most interesting of these industrial artifacts are found on the main trails just a ten-minute walk from Walmart, including these two gigantic lathes. They sit side by side in a grove of birches and maples, with wheels some six feet in diameter and carriages nearly twenty feet long. I’ve run and mountain biked these trails countless times over the years, and the fascniating machinery is typically just glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as I try not to kill myself at high speed. But on this day, I purposely walked (walked) out into the forest just to take images of some of the relics.
In order to help animate theses machines, at rest and seized by rust for decades, I used a technique called ICM photography, which stands for Intentional Camera Movement. If you want to watch a master at work, check out my friend Andy Gray’s YouTube channel. In brief, you set the camera at a narrow aperture (f/11 or thereabouts), and a slow shutter speed (1.4 to 1 second, typically), add a neutral density filter, if necessary, to get those settings, and blast away. During each exposure you are twisting and girating your camera in any number of ways to create images that show, well, intentional movement. The resulting photos, when carefully combined and manipulated in Photoshop, are often quite abstract and moody, not documenting a scene, but rather implying what was there, sometime in barely recognizable ways.
What I like about this image is that by making shots that emphasized the spinning of the giant wheels, in a strange way, I was able to bring these silent and stationary lathes back to life. And the scene (which was very quiet and peaceful, and most certainly in a state of repose and stasis) has now taken on a kind of dynamic, chaotic, purposeful movement—recalling the kind of industrial bustle that must have occurred here on a daily basis back in the quarry’s heyday. It must have been some awful loud.
Here’s the big Flickr version.
Meta: Pentax K-70, Pentax 15mm, f/4 lens at a way smaller aperture than that, ISO 100, various slow shutter speeds, about 6 images blended
