I made my second trip to Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site today (Monday 9-7-2009). This trip, I tried to do some different compositions that would reflect life as a worker at the furnace back when they were in operation. Hopewell Furnace tells a fascinating story. Built by patriot Mark Bird, the furnace operated from 1771 to 1883. While its most profitable items were stoves, the furnace cast many other objects such as kettles, machinery and grates. The casts for many of those items were created in this cast room where workers called “moulders” fashioned the dark, gritty sand into shapes that molten iron would then be poured into to create the object being manufactured.
For more information on visiting Hopewell Furnace, please visit their web site
Because of the exposure challenges in this particular room (no internal lights, very bright light coming through the windows) I chose to shoot this as nine bracketed RAW frames at .7 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and finally, tone mapped that image to create the final image.
