First time I visited the abandoned Grantsville, Nevada mining district in 2001 there was a very large, very old Caterpillar bulldozer parked beside the mill. It was almost complete. Visiting again in May 2012 I found it almost completely gone. Metal scrappers had used blowtorches to carve it into manageable pieces and dragged them to the recycler. Only the seat frame, part of the chassis rails and engine/driveline remain. It’ll probably ALL be gone the next time I make it out there again. Judging by the graf on there, I’m not the only one disappointed by this.
The camera was placed along the machine’s centerline, just at the ends of the cut off frame rails, to take advantage of its innate symmetry. It’s parked on a slope, so I left the camera level, taking advantage of the scene’s natural lean in an effort to break up the stiff, static nature of perfectly symmetrical images. I also made sure to break the horizon line with the top of the seat and levers: to get that sick green to pop against the blue sky and to follow the angle of the hill.
Lit with the Protomachines flashlight, I mixed up a strong yellow/green that complimented the natural color of the dozer and lit her from both sides. Then I lit the ground underneath with red from below the camera, bouncing it up onto the engine block. 332 second exposure, full moon.
Don’t Cut Me Up! ::::: Grantsville, Nevada ::::: May 2012
