This collection is the product of several walk-arounds many years ago (2007) at an iron smelting yard that used to be in St. Johns, just north of Portland. A lot of these pictures are just rust patterns from plate steel that have been left out in the weather for a number of years. This kind of is an experiment in abstract photography.

The raw images themselves are unimpressive, but if you tinker with them in Photoshop—adjust the contrast and the color saturation, and especially the blues and reds and orange tone curves, plus some selective dodging and burning to lighten areas and darken others—you can get some really neat abstract, artsy shots.

I am not usually a big fan of this style of photography, but it was fun how these turned out. Some of the pictures, like “forest fire” and “fire dancing,” are my favorites.