Hotchkiss Brothers Factory Complex

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Photo courtesy of Loop.net The One That Got Away: A Lumber Mill, Some Idiots, and a Call I Don't Regret Some stories don't have a satisfying ending. This is one of them. And I've been carrying it around long enough that I just need to put it down somewhere. J and I drove out to Torrington on what should have been a straightforward documentation run in 2023. The target was the former Hotchkiss Brothers Lumber Mill on Water Street, sitting on the east bank of the Naugatuck River. We scoped it on the way in, circled the block, found our parking spot, and liked what we saw. Entry looked manageable. The building looked intact enough to be worth the effort. We were ready. We crossed through the Stop & Shop parking lot in the full summer heat, shoppers drifting past us with their carts, completely indifferent. We clambered over a wall, pushed through branches that swatted us in the face, and followed the sound of the Naugatuck moving over rocks somewhere below. The grass...
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The eXperiment #2

While reading an interesting article on Petapixel on the sweet spot of lenses. It came to mind that maybe if I shot at the required aperture of 5.6 @10mm which I shoot almost always I would substantially control variables in my little AEB experiment using my camera setup. It makes sense to shoot at the best aperture that produces the sharpest images I can get during my explorations.


In eXperiment #1, my aperture was at different settings and may have skewed the final photos before blending them together creating slightly sharp photos due to the aperture. It is true that shooting at the sharpest aperture of your lens is important in this little eXperiment but found out that in the field shooting at aperture 5.6 @ 10mm didn't always produce the correct and proper exposure for the scene.

Continuing on in the field I came back with the following.



6 Images



12 Images



I could not discern any notable differences in image quality in both sets of images. Nothing popped out at me as found in eXperiment #1. I surmise that maybe the blending software has its limits passed a certain amount of numbered images. I would love to get my hands on some raw Sony A7R III files to test the comparison between an 18MP camera and a 42MP. I'm curious to see what the outcome would produce.




6 Images Edit


12 Images Edit



I may have found in another subset of photography that macro photographers use stacked images of insects and flowers using hundreds of images than my 12-image roster here. Some final images can surpass 300 images all stacked into one clean image of a well-defined, detailed, and sharp final image. A veteran of this subject is none other than Turkish photographer Can Tunçer.

To see more of his work check out his website here and Flickr page here.

Now it may be back to the drawing board for me as I head out with more knowledge and hypotheses.

Continuing on to eXperiment #3.

Stay tuned.

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